Hjoerring Municipality

Hjoerring Municipality is in the northern part of Jutland in Denmark. It´s a rural area characterized by a few towns and many smaller villages. Of the total 62.000 citizens, most live in single houses, and 67% are heated by district heating.

11 district heating companies

There are 11 district heating companies spread throughout the municipality. They are all owned by citizens and organized with boards. Economically, they all follow the Danish principle of “self-balancing,” which means they are not allowed to make minus or plus in the annual accounts. They are all transforming these years from black to renewable energy, and this transformation is expected to succeed in 2 to 3 years.  

Local renewable energy production for district heating

Renewable heat comes mainly from different local sources: A waste incinerator, wood pellets and wood chips, wind, and solar parks combined with heat pumps or electric boilers, as well as surplus heat from industry. When we look into the near future, electrification will be growing. We even have a district heating company that wants to have its own wind park and a smaller solar park. The use of surplus heat from the local industry will be growing over the next two years; it will come from the production of biogas, hydrogen, methanization, pyrolysis, and refrigerated warehouses. This means that the main input is based on local energy resources from surplus heat and locally produced electricity.