Your choices:
1 Biomass (solid); 2 District cooling; 3 Process heat
| What is your resource? | What do you want to deliver? | What is the service the customer wants? |
| Biomass (digestible sludge) | 2 District cooling | Comfortable indoor climate |
| Biomass (fermentable sludge) | District heating | Electricity |
| 1 Biomass (solid) | Electricity | Process cooling (< 0 °C) |
| Geothermal | Fuel: Gaseous | 3 Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C) |
| Sunshine | Fuel: Liquid | Process heat (150 - 1000 °C) |
| Water | Fuel: Solid | Process heat (> 1000 °C) |
| Wind | Local cooling (ind. house) | Transport |
| Residual oils/fats etc | Local heating (ind. house) |
District cooling is distributed by the aid of cold water. This means that there is a strict limit to the lowest possible temperature, namely plus a few degrees on the Celsius scale.
Therefore, district cooling may be used to provide chilling in for example a dairy while it can obviously not be used to provide freezing temperatures.
In such cases when an industrial need such as a dairy can be converted from using compressor cooling machines into using district cooling – and if the central district cooling production unit is an integrated tri-production plant – then the net effect is that a large, industrial, electricity consumer is replaced by a biomass-based electricity producer.