The planning of heating and cooling supply and demand is key to reaching climate and sustainability targets. At the same time, data for planning are scarce for many places in Europe. In this study, we developed an open source dataset of gross floor area and energy demand for space heating and hot water in residential and tertiary buildings at the hectare level for EU28 + Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland. This methodology is based on a top-down approach, starting from a consistent dataset at the country level (NUTS 0), breaking this down to the NUTS 3 level and further to the hectare level by means of a series of regional indicators. We compare this dataset with data from other sources for 20 places in Europe. This process shows that the data for some places fit well, while for others, large differences up to 45% occur. The discussion of these results shows that the other data sources used for this comparison are also subject to considerable uncertainties. A comparison of the developed data with maps based on municipal building stock data for three cities shows that the developed dataset systematically overestimates the gross floor area and heat demand in low density areas and vice versa. We conclude that these data are useful for strategic purposes on aggregated level of larger regions and municipalities. It is especially valuable in locations where no detailed data is available. For detailed planning of heating and cooling infrastructure, local data should be used instead. We believe our work contributes towards a transparent, open source dataset for heating and cooling planning that can be regularly updated and is easily accessible and usable for further research and planning activities.

Mitigating CO₂ emissions for space heating (SH) and hot water (HW) preparation in buildings is key to reaching climate protection targets. In this context, it is important to understand meaningful balances between CO₂ reduction through thermal renovation activities and the change of heating systems. In this work, we develop cost-optimal balances for different system settings with the Invert/Opt model. This model optimises the measures applied in each building so that the system costs for SH and HW preparation are minimised under given constraints for a given country. About 500–1000 options are considered for each building. We calculate scenarios and sensitivities for all countries of EU-27, reflecting a 95% reduction in CO₂ emissions for SH and HW with a mix of direct and indirect RES technologies. These differ in the settings related to the applicability and costs of building-shell-related measures and the costs and availability of resource potentials. The results show that probably a high share of thermal renovation on total upcoming refurbishment activities until 2050 is cost-efficient to reach a 95% CO₂ reduction in the EU-27 building stocks. Assuming that up to 90% of the buildings in each EU-27 country is applicable for a thermal renovation in case a refurbishment activity is needed leads to around 4% lower system costs by 2050 (13 billion EUR/year) compared to assuming a maximum share of 35%. Energy needs are reduced on average more in older buildings than in newer buildings. Nonetheless, a combination of thermal renovation and heating system change is often the most cost-effective option to reduce system-wide CO₂ emissions also in more recent buildings. The calculations lead to cost-optimal savings in final energy demand in the range of 29–47% between 2019 and 2050. Assuming less favourable conditions for thermal renovation (high capital recovery expectations, additional technical barriers and high availability of cheap fuels) the cost-optimal level of heat savings in buildings for overall EU-27 could be suspected at around 1/3 down to 1/4 of current final energy demand.

The scope of this investigation is to analyze recent advances in district cooling (DC) in Europe (European Union plus the United Kingdom (EU27+UK)). The study focuses on data and information from the past decade and draws a picture for the year 2016. To date, in contrast to the European district heating market, the European DC branch has barely been explored in scientific literature. In the current paper, the data that describe the actual DC market in the EU27+UK—which includes the quantity of DC plants, equivalent full-load hours, and installed capacities as well as the values for seasonal energy efficiency—are collected and then explored using a bottom-up approach. The results indicate that DC is responsible for a minor part of the useful energy demand of Europe for cooling with around 3 TWh/y. Overall, the share of the useful energy demand for DC corresponds with 1 to 2% of the EU27+UK useful energy demand. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the penetration of DC varies considerably from country to country, and eight European Member States appear to not have district cooling systems at all. Lastly, it is observed that DC has been slowly but constantly growing in Europe for decades and is characterized by a high growth potential, particularly in the service sector.