District Heat Networks: From Technical Feasibility to Socio-Economic Reality

The UK’s heat transition lags electricity decarbonisation: residential heating remains dominated by fossil gas, and dense urban areas face electrical and spatial constraints that limit building-level solutions. District heat networks (DHNs) offer a scalable, collective pathway, yet rollout is hindered by the interplay of engineering limits, market design, and institutional coordination. Approaches are beginning to couple engineering simulation with socio-economic modelling, but they remain under-developed, particularly in representing stakeholder heterogeneity, social learning, environmental and spatial constraints, and path dependence. This limits planning-grade decision support for local authorities, operators and project developers, sustaining cost and delivery bottlenecks. This thesis develops and applies a sequential network dynamics and socio-technical modelling framework for planning and scaling DHNs in UK cities. A thermo-hydraulic model conceptually informs an agent-based model (ABM) of household connection decisions, developer strategies, and policy scenarios, so that behavioural diffusion shapes physical routing and deployment. Across the work, analysis indicates that slow DHN deployment arises less from technical limits than from market design, institutional coordination, and customer-side frictions. Technically, scale and connectedness suppress losses and unlock low-grade heat (for example, industrial waste heat, mine water); behaviourally, adoption is path-dependent and place-specific; strategically, purely commercial strategies can lead to systematic under-provision while purely social ones can create equity traps. The thesis identifies a policy-created ‘performance plateau’ in which zoning, balanced operator mandates, predictable support, and transparent tariffs align profitability with inclusive coverage. Methodologically, it advances a planning-grade approach that explains who connects and when and, once the bidirectional loop is implemented, what can be built and operated. The result is a decision-ready basis for equitable, financeable DHN expansion, with clear priorities for validation, local-authority planning, tariff design, and equity-aware optimisation.