GREEN HEAT - towards collaborative local decarbonization

Despite the fact that many Polish cities have a very well-developed district heating system, a huge number of houses still use individual boilers for heating and domestic hot water preparation. The vast majority is based on fossil fuels, mainly coal, causing air pollution and emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

For the selected Pilot Case in Legionowo, Poland, a participatory procedure for the gradual elimination of individual fossil fuel boilers will be developed and carried out. This will lead to a recommendation on the target structure of the new local energy system based on renewables, indicating potential technology suppliers, listing financing sources and providing the business model of operation worked out together with local stakeholders. System should be socially and economically accepted and feasible in a reasonable time. This process will be used to develop a methodology to ultimately eliminate individual fossil fuel boilers from other locations/cities

Project employs a multidisciplinary approach to achieve the project objectives, literature review, data analysis, surveys, individual and group in-depth interviews, system dynamic models, energy system analysis and modelling, co-creation and participatory process to support decision making processes.

The work is divided into thematic work packages looking at the problem from different perspectives; these are social, technical and economical. There is also one work package combining all of the aspects and developing tools - system dynamics (SD) models to support the transdisciplinary analysis.

Representatives of various stakeholders will be invited to cooperate: residents, technology suppliers, city council representatives, local businesses, potential investors, government agencies and NGOs.

Leader: Instytut Maszyn Przepływowych im. Roberta Szewalskiego Polskiej Akademii Nauk

Partners:  Akademia Leona Koźmińskiego, Norsk institutt for luftforskning (Norway), Universitetet i Bergen (Norway), Akademia Pedagogiki Specjalnej im. Marii Grzegorzewskiej, CASE - Centrum Analiz Społeczno-Ekonomicznych,  Fundacja KEZO affiliated to Centrum Badawcze Polskiej Akademii Nauk

Grant: IDEALAB - Programme 'Applied Research' – NCBiR

See the project website: https://greenheat.kezo.pl/