A multi-energy district concept for Schaffhausen, built with Planeto

The challenge

Schaffhausen set out to plan a next-generation district energy system for a portfolio of 349 buildings, with an annual energy demand of 6.28 GWh. The goal was to integrate several renewable sources efficiently while keeping the planning and operation manageable for a municipal team. Three things made that hard.

• Multi-source integration. Solar thermal collectors, wood biomass plants and heat pumps each have different demand profiles and seasonal patterns, and they had to be combined into one coherent supply concept.
• Network topology. The distribution network needed multiple heat injection points and meshed thermal flows to stay reliable and keep losses down, which makes the layout a design problem in its own right.
• Operational complexity. Coordinating several sources and injection points should not overwhelm the technical resources of the people who have to run the system.

A district of this size and mix is more than a spreadsheet can resolve: the source mix, the network layout and the operating strategy all depend on each other.

How the concept was built

Sympheny and Planeto planned the district together, combining two complementary tools into a single, largely automated pipeline that takes a building portfolio through to a costed, optimised concept.

• Geospatial network design (Planeto TESSA). Planeto’s TESSA clustering mapped the network topology across the 349-building portfolio, locating the heat injection points and designing the meshed thermal distribution network.
• Multi-energy hub optimisation (Sympheny). Sympheny optimised the integration of the solar thermal, wood biomass and heat pump options — determining the sizing, dispatch and operating parameters for each source against the district’s demand.
• Phased build-out. The plan starts with 180 buildings connected by 5.8 km of optimised pipeline: a validated first stage before the full district is rolled out.

Why work with Planeto

Sympheny does the energy concept; Planeto handles the network and hydraulic layer. Sympheny decides which technologies go in, at what size and operated how, across heat, power and storage. Planeto’s TESSA designs the physical network around it: building clustering, routing, heat injection points and hydraulic, meshed-network design. On a project like Schaffhausen, where the source mix and the pipe network shape each other, running the two together means the layout and the supply concept are designed against one another rather than in sequence — the full path from a map of buildings to a buildable, costed concept.

Result

The first phase connects 180 buildings through 5.8 km of optimised pipeline, with multiple heat injection points and a meshed network supplied by solar thermal collectors, wood biomass and heat pumps. The automated pipeline shortens the planning effort needed to reach a concept of this complexity, and gives Schaffhausen a validated foundation for extending the design across all 349 buildings.

Originally published as a Planeto customer story.