How will Dutch homes be heated in the future without natural gas? All municipalities must submit concrete plans by 2026: district heating, heat pumps, or will there still be a gas connection? The premise is the choice with the lowest costs for the Netherlands as a whole. Today, the PBL publishes a solid basis for that choice with the Update of the Starting Analysis for Natural Gas-Free Neighborhoods. It updates all costs from the earlier Starting Analysis from 2020.
No Blueprint, but Starting Point
The updated Starting Analysis provides municipalities with a good basis for considerations in heating plans, but it is not a blueprint for how the Netherlands will look in 2050. To make appropriate choices, it is important for municipalities to investigate whether they need to adjust existing plans and whether they need to add local information. For example, are there existing plans for large-scale housing insulation by the housing corporation? And how robust is a local heat source - is it, for example, a central or factory that may close in the future? After this local enrichment, municipalities are ready to shape their heating programs. The Starting Analysis calculates the national costs of climate-neutral heating for 14,000 neighborhoods and 3,500 districts in the Netherlands with 4 strategies and 18 variants. See startanalyse.pbl.nl.
No Major Shifts
The updated Starting Analysis shows no major shifts at the national level compared to the previous edition from 2020. In this analysis, HR boilers are no longer accounted for, but the limited amount of available climate-neutral gas (green gas or green hydrogen) is used in hybrid heat pumps. This gas is therefore distributed over slightly more connections, especially in areas with a low building density. As a result, slightly more (4 percentage points) buildings remain connected to a gas network than in the previous edition.
Availability of Climate-Neutral Gas Highly Uncertain
The future availability of climate-neutral gas is highly uncertain. This analysis assumes 2 billion cubic meters in 2050, a goal of the central government based on the Climate Agreement. If less climate-neutral gas is available or if it is very expensive, hybrid heat pumps will no longer be the option with the lowest costs in neighborhoods that the main analyses currently indicate. Then electric heat pumps will replace them. In these neighborhoods, focusing on housing insulation is a robust strategy so that one can fall back on the electric heat pump, which requires very good insulation.
Many Neighborhoods with Cost Differences of Less Than 20% Between Heating Options
The results often emphasize the heating option with the lowest national costs. As a result, heating options with roughly comparable costs may disappear from view. In the results, for 70% of the buildings, the second cheapest heating option is more than 20% more expensive than the cheapest. In the remaining 30% of cases, the costs for either a heat pump or a district heating system at low, medium, or high temperatures are close together (less than 20% difference). For indication: for 17% of the buildings, the cost difference between two strategies is less than 10%, and for 38% of the buildings less than 30%.
Time Scale Important for District Heating
The Starting Analysis shows that district heating has the lowest national costs for 29% of the buildings. In neighborhoods where district heating is implemented, time is an important factor, as the General Audit Office recently pointed out. As long as uncertainty remains about the possible construction of a district heating system, there will be individual citizens who install heat pumps, reducing the number of potential connections for a district heating system. Thus, delaying choices gradually deteriorates the business case for district heating, and postponement can lead to cancellation.
National Costs Say Nothing About Cost Distribution
The Starting Analysis calculates the costs for the Netherlands (national costs) for different heating options per neighborhood. It does not take into account how costs can be redistributed through taxes or subsidies. Individual user costs will depend on political choices regarding that redistribution. Costs for upgrading the electricity grid, for example, are currently borne by all Dutch citizens, while the costs of constructing a district heating system are only borne by the users of that district heating system. As a result, users of a district heating system can end up being more expensive individually, even in cases where a district heating system has the lowest national additional costs. This is an important issue. The PBL will publish a more extensive analysis later this year on the implications of the results of this updated Starting Analysis for national policy.