Cowi’s Ireland district heating mandate: routing and design notes for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Engineering and design firm Cowi has been appointed by the European Investment Bank to advise the Irish government on a nationwide district heating strategy expected to support up to €4bn (£3.5bn) of heat network infrastructure by 2035. The mandate will shape technical standards, phasing and financing for multiple urban heat networks, likely integrating waste heat, large-scale heat pumps and thermal storage into existing gas- and electricity-dominated systems. Civil and energy engineers should expect demand for detailed network routing, trench design, and interface works with dense urban utilities and building retrofit programmes.
Technical Brief
- Mandate runs to 2035, requiring long-term phasing of trenching, pipe installation and plant integration.
- EIB appointment positions Cowi as technical adviser on network hydraulics, thermal losses and redundancy criteria.
- Work will define standard pipe materials, insulation classes and jointing systems for Irish urban conditions.
- Routing guidance expected to address shallow cover, congested utilities and traffic management in historic streets.
- Cowi likely to specify interface requirements at energy centres, substations and building heat exchangers.
- Financing advice will influence packaging of multiple local schemes into bankable, staged construction programmes.
- Strategy will need to coordinate with existing gas mains renewals and electricity network reinforcement works.
- For similar European mandates, Cowi has previously developed design toolkits standardising peak load and diversity assumptions.
Our Take
Within our 517 Infrastructure stories, Ireland features far less frequently than the UK on large-scale heat and energy network planning, so this mandate signals Dublin moving closer to the kind of district energy build-out already common in British city-regeneration schemes.
An investment potential of up to €4bn by 2035 for Irish district heating puts this programme in the same order of magnitude as some national rail or grid-modernisation pipelines in our database, meaning contractors will need to plan for multi-phase, multi-city delivery rather than isolated pilot schemes.
With the European Investment Bank involved on the advisory side, Ireland’s district heating framework is likely to be aligned with EU taxonomy and green-finance criteria, which can shape technical choices such as heat-source mix, network efficiency standards and metering approaches for future projects.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
