The shift to a lower-carbon heating system would reduce big-picture costs, like, global costs, societal costs. But how would it affect customers' bills?
Motaz Abu and his family moved last year from Sandyford to the new blocks of cost-rental homes at Tallaght's Innovation Square.
His home, and the others in the complex of 133 apartments, are connected to a council-owned district heating system, which pipes hot water to radiators in a growing number of buildings in the area.
This is the first district heating network of its kind in the country, the council has said – though they are common in other European countries.
And they are a key part of the government's plan to heat homes and offices without using fossil fuels, helping to reduce the country's carbon emissions, to contribute to blunting climate change.
The shift to a lower-carbon heating system would reduce big-picture costs, like, global costs, societal costs. But how would it affect customers like Abu?
His energy bill hasn't gotten any cheaper since he moved here from there, he said outside his apartment on Wednesday.
Another tenant, Jayme Pardini, who lives in his Innovation Square apartment alone, says that for one person, his heating bill feels far too expensive. He pays around €150 for two months of heating, he said on Wednesday.
South Dublin County Council owns the cost-rental apartments at Innovation Square, and Heat Works, the non-profit energy utility which operates the system.
But the council won't say how much exactly the tariffs and standing charges are for its tenants, customers of its heating system.
However, a utility bill for one apartment in Innovation Square offers a behind-the-scenes peek. It cites a rate of 18.5c/KWh. The standing charge, meanwhile, is 78.4c a day.
That's much higher than the unit rate and standing charge for gas outlined in a recent bill from Electric Ireland for a gas-heated terraced home in the city.
That shows a rate of 10.3c/KWh, and a standing charge of 37.6c a day. Although, it also has a carbon tax of 1.15c/KWh.
Cheaper, more carbon-intensive gas can be an option for heating for now. More homes in Dublin use that, rather than other sources. But regulations effectively don't allow gas heating in newbuilds.
So perhaps the better comparison is with electricity rates, but that's a bit tricky.
A recent electricity bill from Electric Ireland has a higher unit rate of 31c/KWh, and a lower standing charge of 63c a day, as well as a PSO Levy of €1.46.
But how much heat a household would get per KWh would depend on whether that electricity is going into, for example, an immersion (not as much) or a heat pump (more).
In any case, at the moment, there's no system to regulate the price of heat from district heating systems, and bring greater transparency to pricing, but the government is working on that. It announced progress last week on the next stage of a bill that would finally create a regulated market for district heating in Ireland.
The district heating scheme in Tallaght was switched on in April 2023.
Water warmed by waste heat from an Amazon data centre travels to a nearby energy centre, where electric heat pumps lift the temperature further, before sending it around the wider neighbourhood.
So far, the system heats the TU Dublin campus and sports building, the council's headquarters, Tallaght Library – and, more recently, the Work IQ building with its flexible office space, and 133 cost-rental homes at Innovation Square.
By the council's count, the network saved about 1,265 tonnes of CO2 in 2024 and 1,422 tonnes in 2025.
And, the council is now gearing up to for its second phase, supplying the area around Cookstown and the hospital, said a written response to independent Councillor Mick Duff in February this year.
It was also doing a feasibility analysis looking at how data centres in Grange Castle Business Park might serve up the heat for a new scheme for homes in that area, the response said.
Heat Works, the council-owned not-for-profit, wouldn't say how much it charges the landlord – which is the council – as it passes the heat on, as that is commercially sensitive, said a council spokesperson last Friday.
But broadly, "heat bills are based on a cost-recovery model that reflects the costs of generating, operating and maintaining the district heating network", said a spokesperson.
"In setting prices, consideration is given to the costs of comparable low-carbon heating technologies. Operational arrangements also require consideration of metering, billing, customer service, network maintenance and regulatory obligations," they said.
"The standing charge is based on the fixed costs of operating the network along with a fixed charge applied by the billing agent," they said. "Again, this is commercially sensitive information and not publicly available."
"The wholesale heat price is based on the cost of input electricity, together with the costs associated with recovering, processing and distributing waste heat through the district heating network," they said.
"A private billing provider has been appointed by the managing agent to administer billing for individual tenancies within this cost-rental scheme," they said. That provider is Yuno Energy, according to a bill and the company's website.
Dylan Murphy, a PhD researcher on sustainability and data centres at University College Dublin, said that the rates laid out in the resident's bill make sense to him.
"Sure, the waste heat is essentially free, but the standing charge is to recoup the capital investment in laying the pipes and associated infrastructure (€4.9 million of public finance in the case of Tallaght)," he said.
"Also, while the Tallaght district heating system gets its baseload temperature from waste heat (water in this case)," it adds additional heat to top that up, he said.
When you factor in that, plus "the electricity-powered pumps needed to move water through the closed-loop system, the €0.185/kWh rate would be a reasonable commercial rate to account for these variables", said Murphy.
Tariffs are set differently for district heating schemes, which heat a whole network, and communal-heating schemes, meaning those that cover just one apartment block, says Pauline O'Reilly, the chief executive officer at the Irish District Energy Association.
For communal heating schemes at the moment, the systems are generally owned and prices set by the management company of an apartment block rather than a heat utility, O'Reilly said. "Although many of these companies employ another company to send out the bills and service the pumps and pipes."
"Each of the communal schemes sets its own prices through a contract but without a regulator to oversee it," she said.
"Communal heating in apartment developments is typically billed through management companies or energy service providers who do this on behalf of the management companies, often benchmarked informally against the cost of gas heating," she said.
So that's communal schemes, for one building. For district schemes, which serve multiple buildings, the situation is different.
"In practice, publicly led heating schemes such as the Tallaght District Heating Scheme operate on a cost-recovery basis," O'Reilly said.
Customers of these systems already have some rights under EU regulations to information on the energy performance and renewable share of their network, she said. "But there is no common pricing framework."
"This is what we expect to change, although prices will still differ across the country because it will depend on where the heat is coming from, they will have to be competitive because they are competing with individual heat pumps and gas," she said.
Murphy, the PhD student, says that comparing district heating systems and heat pumps is, for him, a bit apples and oranges. "These systems have similar outcomes but achieve them through very different means."
After all, air-to-heat pumps extract heat from the cold outside air while district heating systems reuse waste heat from, typically, industrial operations or centralised boiler systems, he said. "The main pro of a district heating system is its ability to deliver reliable heating at scale and to reuse otherwise wasted heat from co-located industries."
"However, the systems are often cumbersome and expensive to get into place due to the complex network of pipes needed, and other standing costs," he said. And, there's the risk of depending on private industry and "greenwashing" their waste for them, he says.
By comparison, air-to-heat pumps are decentralised, typically serving a single building, but require sufficient insulation and low-temperature heating (like underfloor heating) within the building for efficient use, he said. "Another pro of the heat pump is that you don’t have to pay the standing fee, just the electricity that you use."
There's a flipside though, too. "The big con of heat pumps is the inequalities they expose, as schemes to date have not targeted low-income houses, which could use them most due to upfront costs," he said.
Lois Kapila
As South Dublin County Council looks to expand its up-and-running district heating system, and Fingal County Council considers building one too, Dublin City Council is still gearing up to launch its own Poolbeg District Heating System.
In the early years of the scheme, the council plans for the Poolbeg district heating network to be operated by a contractor, the council's chief executive said in February as it pushes to prove its concept. It would likely run at a loss, as it scaled up customers, said the response.
In March, Feargal O'Rourke, current chair of the IDA, who also sits on the board of Yuno Energy, wrote to Dublin City Council Chief Executive Richard Shakespeare pitching Yuno as a partner for that project.
Yuno Energy has about 90 percent of the district heating market at the moment, his email said.
"We believe Yuno can get that delivered at scale and speed for less than the current estimates, in an economic model which would be beneficial for all sides," said O'Rourke.
Yuno Energy hasn't responded to queries sent on Thursday morning, asking for detail of what it was proposing, and what it thought would be needed to improve affordability of district heating systems for end consumers.
In Tallaght, the council's response to Duff did mention some measures underway that would improve affordability, though.
The network would be adding a "Thermal Storage solution at the Energy Centre", which would "allow mitigation of demand fluctuations, improve response solutions, and increase access to low-cost renewable electricity supply sources particularly at night", it said.
"Expanding the customer base and incorporating thermal-storage capabilities are crucial steps for the system to achieve maximum operational efficiency and lower costs to customers," it said.
On 10 July, Minister for Climate Energy and Environment Darragh O'Brien, a Fianna Fáil TD, announced that that cabinet had approved revisions to the General Scheme of the Heat (Networks and Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2024, which would put in place a regulatory framework for district heating in Ireland.
An updated version of the general scheme hasn't been published yet. But the bill will bring in consumer protections for existing and new district heating and communal heating customers, through price regulation of supplier tariffs, according to a government press release.
It will be based on "a step-in, principles-based approach to price regulation, and consumer protection requirements such as vulnerable customer registers, customer charters, codes of practice and complaint handling procedures", it says.
How the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) would go about that is yet to be seen, said O'Reilly, of the Irish District Energy Association. But it broadly means that the regulator won't set tariffs upfront, she said.
Instead, "operators will price their heat against clear principles – fairness, transparency and cost-reflectivity – and the CRU will have an expanded range of powers and administrative sanctions to intervene where pricing or conduct falls short", she said.
Also, "vulnerable customer registers, customer charters, codes of practice and complaint-handling procedures will be mandatory, giving heat customers parity of treatment with gas and electricity customers under the same regulator", she said.
"The revisions to the General Scheme approved by Government this month would move Ireland from an essentially unregulated market to a regulated utility model," says O'Reilly.
Partly funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
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