The location of potential sources of waste heat energy is provided as part of the Scotland Heat Map. Alongside data on heat demand, this is used to identify opportunities to reduce carbon emissions from heat in buildings, either by connecting supply and demand in a more efficient manner or by using lower carbon alternatives to existing supply. It identifies sites where heat energy that may otherwise be wasted could potentially be put to use for heating purposes. Further investigation would be required to determine if this is possible. Some of the sites included may already be providing waste heat energy and others may be in various stages of the planning system.

The Scotland Heat Map is produced by the Scottish Government. Data on potential energy supply comes from two sources: the ClimateXchange (CXC) 2020 ‘Potential sources of waste heat for heat networks in Scotland’ research project and data on locations of cooling towers collected from Scottish Local Authorities in 2013. Sites taken from the CXC research project have been located using their postcode centroid. Cooling towers have been located using address information provided by LAs. In some cases this may also mean location is based on postcode centroid. The combination of these two datasets does not represent all potential sources of waste heat energy in Scotland. In addition, there may be overlap between the datasets.

More information can be found in the documentation available on the Scottish Government website: https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotland-heat-map-documents/.

The final report for the CXC ‘Potential sources of waste heat for heat networks in Scotland’ project is available on the CXC website: https://www.climatexchange.org.uk/media/4481/waste-heat-sources-for-heat-networks-scotland-final-nov-20.pdf.