New Role of District Heating as Infrastructure for Increasing the Use of Renewable Energy Sources

Renewable energy sources (RES) will certainly play a key role in moving towards sustainable development of economy. Talking about prospects of the use of solar energy, it is evident that the main market is the heating sector in the consumer\'s side. The main and most important problems, determining that the absorption process in the consumer\'s side is slow, are the lack of knowledge and organisation, large and deterrent amount of investments, and particularly differences of motivation between energy suppliers and consumers in the heating sector. The main purpose of the research is what conditions are required for heat energy that is produced by consumers based on solar technology and how this type of heat energy source would be able to compete with other energy sources. District heating (DH) may be an appropriate infrastructure for the implementation of RES technologies both in production and demand side. Conclusions were drawn concerning on what scale and under what assumptions the use of solar technologies may be competitive.