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District heating and cooling systems have been present on the European market for more than a century, constantly evolving into more efficient energy infrastructures important for decarbonization of the heating and cooling sectors. With roughly 17,000 operational district heating systems, serving over 70 million citizens, currently, the final energy consumption attributed to district heating in Europe is estimated at over 450 TWh. As the European district heating and cooling sector varies extensively in every analyzed aspect, there are vast differences between European countries regarding technical preferences, technological development, market structure and regulatory frameworks of these systems. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the present status of the district heating and cooling systems in Europe with insight(s) and suggestions into future trends. In addition, the provided data serves as a valuable baseline for future research. Finally, this paper draws attention to the new socio-demographic approach, observed when analyzing the district heating and cooling systems, that has been recently introduced into the scientific community. This new approach also reveals the opportunity for creating new indicators that will influence the modeling of existing and future district heating and cooling systems. • Provides a review on ongoing trends in European district heating and cooling sector. • Analyses European DHC systems from technological, market, and regulatory aspect. • Provides an overview on commonly used performance indicators and energy models. • Discusses the possibility of creating new DHC indicators. • Discusses the trends in future DHC development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of great transition of the European construction sector to energy efficient and nearly zero energy buildings (nZEB), a market observation containing qualitative and quantitative indications should help to fill out some of the current gaps concerning the EU 2020 carbon targets. Next to the economic challenges, there are equally important factors that hinder renovating the existing residential building stock and adding newly constructed high performance buildings. Under these circumstances this paper summarises the findings of a cross-comparative study of the societal and technical barriers of nZEB implementation in 7 Southern European countries. The study analyses the present situation and provides an overview on future prospects for nZEB in Southern Europe. The result presents an overview of challenges and provides recommendations based on available empirical evidence to further lower those barriers in the European construction sector. The paper finds that the most Southern European countries are poorly prepared for nZEB implementation and especially to the challenge/opportunity of retrofitting existing buildings. Creating a common approach to further develop nZEB targets, concepts and definitions in synergy with the climatic, societal and technical state of progress in Southern Europe is essential. The paper provides recommendations for actions to shift the identified gaps into opportunities for future development of climate adaptive high performance buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Long term field evaluation of forecast control of heating. • Easy integration with existing installations in buildings. • Widely applicable measure for energy savings around 10%. • Payback time below one heating season. The priority for reaching carbon neutral buildings by 2050 is to first increase energy efficiency in existing buildings by use of easily and widely applicable measures that are verified based on long-term field research. One such solution is a forecast control of heating systems, which can be quickly and easily integrated to existing weather based controls. However, there are still no long-term field evaluation and detailed analyses of the main features of such a system, which would provide a clear picture about the system's energetical and economical features and thus increase their wide application in existing buildings. This paper provides the data from a long term field evaluation of an innovative forecast control of heating systems (forHEAT), which can be easily installed (in less than 2 h) and integrated with existing installations in millions of existing buildings in Europe and throughout the world. The energy consumption for heating was evaluated in seven residential buildings and three public office buildings before and after the installation and use of the forecast control. The resulting energy savings averaged 13.4% in the residential and 10.7% in the public buildings located in continental European climate, with very cold winters. The payback time averaged a 0.6 heating season and in most case studies does not exceed a single heating season. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the electricity, heating, and cooling sectors at national level for various European countries. Annual energy demands are compared for all 28 EU countries, while peak hourly demands are compared for four countries that vary significantly. The results indicate that the heat demand is currently the largest of the three demand types considered in terms of both annual and peak demands: it is the largest annual demand in 25 of the 28 EU countries, and it represents the largest peak demand in all four countries analysed. Electricity, heating, and cooling demands are all likely to change significantly in the future with increasing electrification, energy efficiency (e.g. building insulation), and improved comfort (especially for cooling). Some extreme scenarios are presented here to quantify the potential impact of these changes on the electricity sector, with results revealing that the demand for electricity could double compared to today, depending on how these changes occur. Considering the scale of additional electricity required to electrify future heating and cooling demands, heat pumps should be prioritised over electric heating and other alternatives, such as district heating and cooling, will likely be required to minimise the strain on the electricity grid in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In all European countries the energy and building related legislature stand for energy refurbishment of existing building stock. Depending on the economical situation of countries there are different national programs that help owners to invest in energy related refurbishments of their houses or flats. The financial support is given only in case of a certain payback time, which should be obtained by the proposed project. The payback time for heating related investments in Hungary is calculated based on the theoretical degree day curve, which can lead to inaccurate results. Thus in this paper a long-term analysis of heating degree day, done for Debrecen (the second largest city of Hungary), is presented. We focused our analysis on residential buildings. It was found that the degree day has important variations during the analysed decades, which can lead to deviations of energy consumption up to 15–18%. Furthermore, taking into account the heat island effects in Debrecen, it was proven that differences of about 22% can be obtained between real degree day values in different zones of the city. The interrelation between specific heat gains and balance point temperature, respectively the effects of glazed area of the facades on the balance point temperature was discussed. It was found that for buildings with similar thermal characteristics of the envelope and the same values of specific heat gains, the balance point temperature can be even double for a detached house compared with a block of flats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]