Italians, as throughout the world, use various forms of heating when it is cold. Fossil fuels are slowly making room for renewable energy.
However, when houses are heated by district heating it is not always there clarity on prices of tariffs. They are applied by the companies that manage the hot water in the pipes, but they do not have the advantage of transparency.
In Italy there are 340 networks of this type, almost all in the North, they are well consolidated and are a good convenience for beyond 3 million condominiums. Last winter, however, many consumers, hit by the price increase, left an investigation by ARERA in which an increase in prices was noted that was not justified by the increase in costs for producing heat. A regulation is expected soon that will make everyone feel calmer.
The study of the Laboratory Ref
Andrea Tenconi, researcher at the Ref Research Laboratory, has conducted a study that is arousing great interest and which involves ARERA itself.
What is district heating? « It represents one of the main alternatives to heating via gas boilers. It is a network system which, through two parallel series of pipes, transports the hot water produced in the generation plants into homes » writes the researcher. The water is heated thanks to the production of secondary heat, which makes the energy system more efficient.
Today more energy sources are used with the increase in wholesale gas prices, the structure of costs and revenues is different from network to network. Basically i citizen-users hunderwent different treatments.
On the consumer side
ARERA has already found that the main methodology used for tariffs is not compliant with the market for alternatives to district heating. We must, therefore, create a clear system for consumption. In practice, choosing between a condition of management monopoly and one of competition, in the interests of people and companies.
“If a regulation must exist - continues Tenconi - it cannot fail to take into account the extremely unusual context for a regulated service. A regulatory system borrowed from the regulation of other sectors is unlikely to be able to fully respond to the specific critical issues of district heating". To keep costs and tariffs under control, you can't rely much on tariff systems. On the other hand, competition is not a bad thing at all.
ARERA has been working on it since August, we are in winter, the radiators in the house are turning on, but in order not to have further protests, gradualness is needed. Why ? « The systems of
District heating are typically (but not always) fully integrated from heat production, to transmission, distribution and sales. It's something that takes time to do
separate the costs of the different phases in order to prevent the tariff from benefiting some operators to the detriment of others." And the citizens? “Citizens risk paying for services they don't have. It is necessary to precisely separate the costs of two services, often integrated from a management point of view".
Two proposals for intervention
In the end, the Ref study puts forward two hypotheses to continue heating homes and not cause anxiety from winter pangs. “The first – explains Tenconi – is said hard regulation, is based on the determination of operating costs according to groupings of district heating networks.
The groups, differentiated by technologies used, size of the cities served, morphology of the territory. In the defined proposal soft regulationInstead, tariff control is applied ex-post, similar to what happens in the Netherlands and Norway.”
In this second case, the basis is the system of the "true avoided cost" of district heating in the various areas. On the other hand for contain ratesBy distributing management costs more widely, municipalities could encourage the connections of new buildings. Obviously we must hope that hot water is produced from clean sources otherwise it is an odious boomerang in the energy transition.
