Heat Roadmap Chile: A national district heating plan for air pollution decontamination and decarbonisation

In many countries around the world district heating can play an important role in decarbonisation since it provides an efficient way of displacing fossil fuels and integrating renewable energy. Simultaneously, in some countries heating is based on the burning of biomass in individual stoves, which can be considered renewable but results in both inefficient heating and high contamination. In such countries, air pollution or decontamination is a more urgent problem. This paper presents the application of a methodology to analyse how district heating could be used as an important technology for coordinated decontamination and decarbonisation purposes looking towards 2050, based on an energy system analysis using hourly simulations, and using data based on spatial analysis to be able to explicitly include a Chile-specific cost for district heating. The results show that district heating also has the potential to be an important infrastructure to reduce air pollution from biomass combustion for heating, in addition to its better understood role of enabling decarbonisation and energy efficiency.