Quantifying the Reliability of District Heating

摘要

Customers of power plants producing electricity to the grid generally do not notice plant failures. In a large number of cases redundancy is present in production capacity while the HV voltage grid has a ring structure. However, customers for district heating generally are bound customers. They have no choice where to source heat from unless they have their own production capacity in addition to heat from piping. Therefore failures of plants supplying heat may have large consequences especially when the peak cannot be supplied and temperatures are low. On what basis can the reliability of district heating be calculated?