A new scientific article from the iDesignRES consortium, authored by Marina Georgati, Steffen Nielsen, Diana Moreno, and Brian Vad Mathiesen at Aalborg University, was published on 19 June 2026 in the International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management, as “Heat Roadmap Europe: Spatial assessment of district heating potential for strategic planning in Europe” (Vol. 49, pages 53-68). The article grew out of work Georgati first presented at SESAAU2025 in Copenhagen back in September 2025, now formalised into a full peer-reviewed study.

Why heat demand needs a regional lens

Heating remains one of Europe’s most energy-intensive sectors, and district heating is widely seen as one of the more realistic routes to decarbonising it, provided it can absorb enough renewable energy and excess industrial heat to displace fossil fuels at scale. The challenge, as the authors frame it, is that heat demand and available heat resources vary enormously from one region to the next, which means any serious expansion strategy has to be built on an understanding of that geographic variability, not a single national average. To address that, the study combines renewable and excess heat resource data with investment cost modelling to work out where district heating actually pays off, producing a harmonised assessment across EU countries alongside a prioritisation framework that ranks locations by cost-effectiveness. The results are mapped at a fine, NUTS 2 level of resolution, highlighting the regions where expansion should be prioritised first, and the analysis also surfaces meaningful differences in how large a share of the heat market district heating could realistically capture from one region to another.

An open-access tool that feeds back into iDesignRES

Alongside the modelling itself, the study delivers a concrete, reusable output: an improved and more accurate version of the Pan-European Heat Atlas, released as an open-access dataset and tool that other researchers and planners can build on directly. The authors position the findings as a resource for policymakers, regional planners, and fellow researchers working toward the roughly 55% district heating market share often cited as necessary for a fully decarbonised European heat sector. That same high-resolution, cost-aware mapping approach is exactly what feeds into iDesignRES’s own energy system models, which rely on this kind of spatial heat data when assessing infrastructure investment choices across the project’s use cases.

IJSEPM was founded by Aalborg University researchers Poul Alberg Østergaard and Henrik Lund.