Digital can play a key role in optimising and decarbonising district heating networks. Uniper has implemented Gradyent's digital solution and is already saving cost and CO2 emissions. Uniper is an international energy company that operates roughly 33 GW of generating capacity, which ranks the company among the world’s largest power producers.

Challenge

Uniper has the ambition to reduce CO2 by 50% in 2030, compared to 2019, of its power plants in Europe.

The company is striving to make its district heating systems more efficient and sustainable, while delivering affordable and reliable heat to their customers. The team at Uniper believes that digital play a key role in making this transformation happen and has selected Gradyent as its partner.

Solution

Building a real-time Digital Twin of the Uniper heating system.

In 2021, we started to build a real-time Digital Twin for one of the Uniper heating systems, including the heat distribution in the network and the heat production units – a complex system of multiple production units in different locations across the network. A Digital Twin is a digital copy of the physical heating system, combining geographical, weather and sensor data with physical models, enhanced by AI. It can predict the heating system’s behaviour in different situations, enabling district heating companies to optimise, decarbonise and grow their systems.

Results

Since fall 2021 the Digital Twin Platform is live and enables real-time optimisation.

While ensuring that every user in the network obtains sufficient heat, the Digital Twin optimises the operation of the network and the source heat dispatch by selecting the most cost-efficient operation strategy of the heat production assets. The Digital Twin shows substantial cost and CO2 reduction potential. This proves that cost savings and decarbonisation can go hand-in-hand.