Identifying future district heating potentials in Germany: a study using empirical insights and distribution cost analysis

District heating will play an important role in the transition towards climate-neutral heating. Various studies on modelling the energy system show that district heating and the related expansion of the networks can have different levels of importance. A main reason is that the costs for distribution grid expansion are not well or not at all considered and empirical evidence for a threshold for cost-effective distribution costs is missing in such studies. In this paper, we aim to improve empirical evidence allowing to improve the representation of future district heating expansion in energy systems models. For that, the current status of district heating is analysed in high spatial resolution for Germany. The results show that with the currently accepted average costs, a large range of the possible future market share of district heating for buildings between 17 - 52% is possible by 2050, with the parameters of the connection rate and the renovation rate of the building stock. We conclude that the district heating share could be increased by the factor of 2 to 5 in the future, proving the importance of climate-neutral district heating in the transition.