Open District Heating: Selling Waste Heat Into the Grid

🤖 AI-generated summary · 🔎 Last verified 2026-07-28

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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Data centres and supermarkets beside the pipes sell their excess heat instead of venting it. Prices are re-set daily in a supplier portal and settled monthly, and more than 20 businesses have signed up.

Outcome🔄 Ongoing

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byStockholm Exergi

Scale🏙️ City-wide

FundingStockholm Exergi finances the pipe connection to each supplier; suppliers finance their own on-site heat-exchange equipment and recoup it through monthly heat-sale payments.

Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 8 more in Stockholm · 🌡️ Heat & cooling guide · ⚡ Energy projects

Since 2014, Stockholm Exergi has let data centres, supermarkets and other businesses near its pipes sell their excess heat instead of venting it. Suppliers install their own heat-exchange equipment; Stockholm Exergi updates temperature-indexed prices daily in an online supplier portal and settles payment monthly. More than 20 businesses are now enrolled as suppliers.

Live 📅 since 2014

📊 Impact

A supplier delivering 1 MW of heat for most of the year earns roughly SEK 2 million annually, according to Stockholm Exergi.

🎓 Lesson

The pricing and metering layer, not the pipe, is what turns a one-way heating network into a two-way market — prices are set daily and heat is billed like a commodity, which is what lets dozens of unrelated businesses plug into the same system without individual negotiation.

⚡ Energy Heat & cooling Smart grid & energy Circular economy Sensors & IoT

Sources

↗ Stockholm Exergi — Open District Heating FAQOperator's own description of the metering/pricing mechanism, supplier count, connection timeline and the SEK 2M/MW/year payment example.

↗ Celsius Initiative — Open District Heating in Stockholm, SwedenEU-funded case study confirming the 2014 launch and describing supplier examples (e.g. Bahnhof Thule data centre).

↗ UNEP Copenhagen Centre on Energy Efficiency — Open District Heating case studyIndependent case study describing the ODH Call / ODH Spot supply models and network scale.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇫🇮 Katri Vala Heat Pump Plant · Helsinki Two ways to add heat: Stockholm buys commercial waste heat into its grid since 2014; Helsinki recovers it from wastewater since 2006. 🇩🇰 AI-Driven Demand Response for Copenhagen's District Heating · Copenhagen Different levers on the same network type: Stockholm buys in outside waste heat; Copenhagen's AI shifts when buildings draw heat. 🇨🇭 Greencity 2000-Watt District Energy System · Zürich Contrast in heat economics: Stockholm markets a buyback of waste heat; Zurich locked ewz into one 30-year energy-contracting deal instead.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision 📖 District heating 📖 Prepaid metering 📖 SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition)

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Open District Heating: Selling Waste Heat Into the Grid” — Stockholm, Sweden. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/stockholm-open-district-heating/ (last verified 2026-07-28). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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