I didn't know district heating was big in Denmark. I do remember reading that a lot of people in the old DDR/GDR had heating from the waste heat of local power stations. After reunification a lot of those where shut down as they were so polluting, but that left those people in the cold. It should be possible to have more efficient heating if you scale it up. When we were looking at building our house we visited a build where they were heating a group of houses with a central boiler.
Oh, and I like the ominous picture. Looks like some extreme geo-thermal.
!PIZZA
The Germans should probably have kept their system, but when it comes to energy-infrastructure they have taken only bad decisions for decades. Worst of course to close down their nuclear plants instead of prolonging the life of the existing installations while changing the system to renewable energy. Instead their system and rules are one big bottleneck in the European net. Now only Poland is more polluting, and they started a lot less developed and a lot poorer. I will not even mention the thing about the Russian gas,
District heating systems are decentralised and can be run on any energy source so we are rolling out even more of it because the current government made the extremely ambitious goal of 70% reduction of co2 emissions in 2030... Geo-thermal is one of the sources that will be used - they are planning an installation in AArhus the second largest city... But now we have to see how close they actually will get to that goal. Maybe the crisis with Russia will speed it up?
There's hope that the actions of Russia will at least result in countries becoming more self-sufficient in energy with renewables as a part of that. We need to break away from the fossil fuel habit, despite the lobbying of those with an interest in it.
It needs more joined-up thinking that also focuses on efficiency.
Yes, whem it becomes a "Strategic Necessity" renewable energy is suddenly very important. Sadly it also seem to imply that we have to buy and build a lot of weapons... In Denmark there was these two competing energy ideas - district heating and natural gas. The latter was mandatory for certain districts to be able to secure an income from the oil and gas adventure in the North Sea. Now the gas part has become an embarrassment, and with the war a problem. It would be nice if the politicians for once tried to look just a little bit ahead. We have known for years that the gas heaters were bad.