This is the Decarbonisation Dialogue, a podcast from Salix. Welcome to Delivering on Climate Change, our collective challenge. Welcome to the Decarbonisation Dialogue. I am Hannah Walker and I believe that the best way to communicate a message is by being passionate about what you are talking about. Through that passion, I believe you take people with you and create action using your influence to make change and make a difference. Our task today is to get all of us to net zero.
My guest today is Morten Djoerdal who is a recognised expert on heat networks. He knows everything there is to know about the development and implementation of district heating in Denmark. He spends much of his time working in the UK explaining the value of heat networks and providing insight into their operations. He will talk to us today about the part heat networks have to play in our society, our cities and our communities.
Morton works for DBDH, which is a Danish member organisation with members from the entire Danish district heating sector. Its vision is to create a better world that benefits from sustainable district energy. Morton has also served as head of secretariat at District Energy Partnership, a Danish district energy lobby organization. District Energy Partnership works to improve framework conditions for district heating, thereby
enhancing Europe's rollout. His career began in the district heating industry in Eastern Europe and Russia more than 20 years ago. And since then, he has worked as a business development director in a large organizations. So welcome. To Morten, good to see you. Thank you, Hannah, and thank you for inviting me. That was some nice words. Thank you. Okay, let's get started. I'd like to start by talking a little bit about your career and your education and how you started
this journey and what your background is. Obviously, to most people in this industry, I'm not an engineer. I'm actually from the, I'm educated at the business school, so I'm kind of an MBA. a Danish version of the MBA and my very first job was in district heating where I did training courses. My very first real job was in district heating. We did training courses for Russian and Eastern European district heating experts because they have and especially had a very different approach to this.
But in reality, my very first job in district heating was when I was around 15 years old because my father asked me to dig the trench from the street so they could lay pipe into our house. I made a fortune, I thought. Well, I felt like I made a fortune. So that's your background. So it's business, but obviously there's a little bit of digging work going on. But you are now working heavily in district because district heating is... I'd like to know exactly what it
is because it isn't new, is it? Here over in the UK, the Sheffield District Heating Supply Company established a heat network back in the 1870s. Pimlico District Heating undertaking opened in the 1950s. So it's not new. Can you explain exactly what they are and how they work? In a way, it started out being just a very large boiler system. Everybody in the UK have a gas boiler or nearly everybody anyway. and then they have a boiler and then they pump heat around to the
radiators. Now imagine you enlarge that system tremendously and you put very large boilers or waste incineration plants or other really huge heat sources out in the city or outside the city and then you just pump hot water in highly isolated pipes that is in the street to each and everybody's building and home. and then we use that hot water to heat. So the interior in your home is exactly the same. The heat just comes from somewhere else through big pipes and these systems can
be really, really big. In Copenhagen from north to south we have like 70 kilometers now in a connected system and east west it's around 50 kilometers and in Copenhagen they provide heat to more than a million people. far more than a million actually when I think about it. So it's a centralized system. Okay, so I want to go back to Copenhagen and I want to talk also
about our awareness of heat networks. But at Salix, we work very much with energy efficiency measures and we're looking all the time at decarbonization and getting rid of those old fossil fuels. So on the heat networks front, are you saying these are good for the planet? In my opinion, yes, they're really good for the planet. That's the shortest possible answer. The difference between you probably have a gas boiler where you live.
The difference is if you want to change the heat source in a district heating system from gas or oil or coal in good old days to something that is really renewable, then you only have to do it one place. Instead of going out to millions and millions of homes and changing their boiler or their heat source there, we can change centralized and we can change in a way where we make it cheap for everybody. So the question was is it climate
friendly? Yes it is. In Denmark we are around 75 % carbon neutral in our district heating and that number is growing every day because we are pushing out all the fossil sources more and more and introducing new renewable sources. Electric boilers running on solar power and wind power, heat pumps, biomass, surplus heat. There are so many heat sources that are otherwise wasted or that are really renewable that we can now
put into our systems. We think we will reach close to 100 % in 5 -10 years, 100 % renewable heat. That is... Good for the climate. That's good for the world. And that is that is certainly good for our planet. Exactly You mentioned the word cheap because we've all got our eye haven't we on the budgets and the heat networks are not cheap Are they they're not initially cheap? No,
but they're affordable. Yes, they are the cheapest solution we have in the in the towns and cities Not in the urban areas, not in the rural areas. There we should do definitely individual heat pumps. That's the absolute best solution out there. But in urban areas, and that's from small villages of maybe, I don't know, 500 buildings and up, maybe even smaller, there it is the cheapest alternative when you look at the overall total
cost of ownership. The problem, and the reason why you say it's not cheap, is probably because you compare to natural gas. And that is a hard one to compete against because that is heavily subsidized over the years. We already have the gas network in place. But let's also be fair and say, I think it's 2045. In the UK, you have agreed that we should not have fossil heat in our heating systems. And that excludes natural gas. So you can't continue comparing to something
you don't want to use in the future. You need to compare to real alternatives. And it may cost a tad more, but it's cheaper than the alternative. And cheaper than that alternative I call affordable. I will also say that in that calculation, we do not include future costs for the climate, for instance. That is not a part of it. We do not include political costs like local jobs or local supply chain or import independence, making us less dependent on resources from states we're
maybe not too happy about. That's also a value. And that is not included in my Affordable. Exactly. So you're arguing that that is something we don't factor in, the result of climate crisis and the kinds of issues that we see on our news. Just come back to Copenhagen because you've talked about Denmark, you've talked about Copenhagen, and indeed Copenhagen is one of the world's most extensive district heating networks, and I think
it supplies about 99 % of the city. Why in the UK, when you compare us to somewhere like Copenhagen, Why are we so behind, if you like? I think we have to go back a very long time. The reason why we have a lot of district heating, twofold. In the energy crisis in the 70s, at that time we already had some district heating and it was fairly successful and fairly okay. So we knew what it was. And when we had the energy crisis in the 70s, we did not have a lot of natural
gas. we could use. It's my personal personal guess and opinion that if we have had all the gas you knew you had in the UK, we would probably have had the same amount of gas heating as you have today. So we were lucky. We felt unlucky at that time, but we were lucky. So from the 70s onwards, especially after the first heat law in Denmark in 1709, we went down two routes. We made sure that our buildings were more and
more and more energy efficient. We have some of the highest energy efficient standards for buildings in Denmark. And at the same time, we dedicated different areas either to have district heating or to use natural gas. So we never rolled out a double system. You didn't do that either in the UK. You just only rolled out natural gas
networks. but we had that choice between the two different systems and when you do not have to invest in more than one as you did then it becomes fairly inexpensive and it's something we give to everybody so why are we ahead of you in the numbers is because we felt unlucky in the 70s what i see when i look at the uk today i see Enormous commitment from many local authorities, both in Scotland and in England, where I work
a lot on this carbon agenda. They're really, really searching for ways to be able to deliver an affordable, fairly priced green heat solution to the citizens. And when you look at Scottish government and DESSNAS, the English Energy Agency, I think they do a lot of good things. I, of course, would love them to do much more and much faster, but that's my job also. Remember that. In terms of actually warming our homes and our buildings, public buildings, et cetera, which country do
you think is best at it today? I'm paid to say Denmark. Yes. I think we do it quite well in Denmark. We have affordable prices in general in Denmark. The vast majority of buildings in Denmark are heated by district heating, two -thirds of them are. They are fairly renewable and we are moving fast forward on the renewable part of it. We will reach 100%. We also see that, if you look at it a bit broader perspective, the Danish district heating sector does a lot
of good for the electricity grid. We have a lot of wind and solar in our electricity grid. Today, the sun is shining and it's fairly windy. I haven't checked electricity prices, but they are low today. I must assume they are low because we have a lot of renewable electricity. And here we have the district heating world that can take up all that inexpensive, nearly surplus electricity and use that. On the other hand, we can decide not to use electricity in the district heating
world when the prices are high. So we can move away when there's a need for electricity in society and when there's too much we can step in because we can store heat a lot better. So we have managed to put together a system. I'm not in any way saying it's perfect, it's not, but it's rather good. we are looking into the overall cost of society every time we make decisions. So we're
also fairly sure we do good for Denmark. So it is really that looking at all of those sources, because we do, through our work here at Salix, we do look at solar, and obviously all the time there's hydro in the background, geothermal, biomass, and of course ocean energy, all of that. So why are we so obsessed with Am I allowed to say this in this country with heat pumps? What's your view on heat pumps? My view on heat sources
is the more you have the merrier. That's my first point of view because then sometimes electricity prices are low or biomass prices are high or something and then in a large system you can switch around. That is very important to keep prices down. You are very and what my view on heat pump is that they are They are very, very important for the future of district heating. We are seeing a lot of heat pumps being introduced
on any source you can imagine. Not warm enough surplus heat from industry, from air, from sewage, from data centers, from all the sources you can manage. A heat pump is pretty neutral when it comes to the heat source that it uses. My view also is that no matter how much I like them, there are also other sources out there. Industrial
surplus heat at the right temperature. Nobody in Denmark would invest in a heat pump if there was a lot of surplus heat to be gained from an industry or from any other source for that matter. Waste incineration. We don't like waste incineration in the future and we want to limit it, but as long as we have it. Why waste the heat? Hydrogen production? We don't even think about burning hydrogen for heating in Denmark. Nobody talks about that ever. But in hydrogen production,
there is a byproduct. That's a lot of heat. Let's use that to heat our homes. So, yes, I like heat pumps very much. I'm just saying there's also other sources out there. You spent a lot of time in Copenhagen and Denmark overall, and you also spent a lot of time in the UK. Can we talk for a moment about skills? Because this is a big subject, because it's all connected, and our goal is to get to net zero. Do you think we have
the skills here? All over Europe there is a tremendous skills issue because all over Europe and the UK we are looking into we need to make heat plants. We need welders. We need people who can operate a district heating system and we do not necessarily have them or clearly we do not have them. But it's not a situation where we come 100 % from nothing because people who are good at welding can be trained to weld district heating pipes. People who are good at city planning can be trained
to do city heat planning. So it's not a completely new industry, but of course with the requirements or the expectations we have that district heating should grow so fast, we need a lot of commitment from educational institution at all levels and all trades more or less. We need a lot of dedication from national governments that they want this to happen. The national government says we need to do, and the numbers changes, but say 30 % district heating within a very short timeframe.
That is a growth that you cannot, that's hard to imagine. And there they need to follow up with training, education, And then they need to be open to use foreign skills. We also need to tell all the manufacturers of pipes and pumps and what have you that we need new products that we can use for this fast, fast, fast change in the world. It should be easier to lay pipes. That is a fair requirement to the pipe manufacturers. It should be easier to, we should digitalize
much more. our whole planning process. It still requires skilled planners. Yes, it does. But we have systems that can assist it. And there are countries in the world who has already come a long way on this. Denmark is one of them. That's a very interesting point, particularly about Weld, as I was on a project recently, and they were talking about the value of exactly that kind of skill. And also, it's establishing, as you say, that kind of joined -up approach between
government, between business. between institutions, training institutions, etc. So you've answered my next question, Morten, which takes me on to your own lifestyle choices. We're talking a lot about saving the planet, creating a better future for generations to come, a cleaner planet, more sustainable energy. How does that all factor out in your own lifestyle? I'll first say, from a district heating perspective, It doesn't do a thing because I have lived in a home with district
heating since the 70s more or less. I've been abroad living a short period of time, but in Denmark I think I've only been in homes with district heating. And in Denmark it's such a natural thing, you don't even think about it. Working in this business and having children inspires me a lot for my lifestyle. I'm cautious about how much I fly. Even though that my job is traveling out from Copenhagen and tell everybody at district heating, I fly more than most people,
but I'm careful how much I fly. I'm careful how much I drive. I even acquired a electric car recently. So there's a lot of small things I do. My hope is that sitting here, talking with you, being in Germany yesterday, working with some specific projects, is my contribution to a better world and a better planet. Thank you. That's certainly inspirational. Thank you very much. And there's a lot of lessons to be learned there. Thank you very much to Morton today for
providing such valuable insight to us. There can be no doubt that climate change is the biggest challenge of our time. Today we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to slow global warming. Today we must act for tomorrow, adjusting our lifestyles to current and future impacts of climate change. Today we must use our collective wisdom to deliver on our climate commitments. Today we work for tomorrow's world. Thank you once again to Morton for spending such incredible time today to talk
to us. about your work and the district heat network systems. Don't forget please do subscribe to our podcast channels and you can always email with ideas please at podcast at salixfinance .co .uk. We'd love to hear what you think about today's podcast and we'd also love to hear your suggestions for future podcasts. So thank you very much to Morten, thank you for your time. Hannah, thank you for inviting me, it was a pleasure. You've been listening to the Decarbonisation
Dialogue, a podcast from Salix. For more information about our work and to find more content, please visit salixfinance .co .uk forward slash podcasts.