A GIS-based tool to support housing associations in the transition towards a district-heating network

The governance of the Netherlands has set an agreement for 2050 to maintain an energy neutral built environment. The energy performance of the built environment should be improved step by step. Housing associations need to make decisions on how they want to reach this neutral housing. They do not use spatial information to determine a strategy for their dwellings. Visualizing spatial information can support the collaboration between the
housing association and other stakeholders, for example the government and utility companies. Geographical Information System (GIS) is commonly used in urban and regional scale planning. GIS-models facilitate decision-making in the field of energy transition. A GIS can illuminate the underlying trends in geographic data and make additional information available. A GIS-based tool is developed, focused on the likelihood of dwellings to be attached to a district heating network in the future. The two renewable energy sources
which can deliver heat to a district heating network are geothermal energy and surplus heat. The outcomes of this GIS-based tool can be used in the decision-making process towards a more sustainable built environment. The GIS-based tool is developed from the consultancy point of view. A final suitability score for a DH-network for all the housing associations’
dwellings in Tilburg is calculated. The highest score of a building was 6.8 out of 10.0. This score is sufficient, but not very high. This can be caused by the rough approximations which are made for the ranges of the criteria.