District Heating Planning

Urbio’s External API generates district heating leads on CKW's website

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CKW, the leading energy provider in central Switzerland, operates a growing portfolio of district heating networks. Faced with the challenge of efficiently expanding its customer-base, CKW wanted to increase customer awareness and streamline acquisition. By integrating Urbio’s external API, CKW transformed its website into a powerful tool for promoting district heating opportunities, raising awareness of their competitive and low-carbon solution.

Customer

CKW

Sector

Utility

Location

Switzerland

Challenge

CKW’s district heating network portfolio grows with 2 new projects every year, increasing the workload related to customer acquisition. Traditional outreach methods like mail flyers are costly and usually yield low response rates.

Also, building owners are often unaware of the potential to connect to a nearby district heating network, resulting in triple disadvantage:

building owners reaching the end of their fossil-boiler’s life invest in personal heat pumps, realizing only afterwards that district heating was more cost- and space-efficient
utilities miss growth opportunities to expand their networks
existing customers pay inflated heat prices due to network infrastructure underutilization

Serving already over 200’000 customers, CKW needed to improve and streamline engagement processes to raise awareness in their service area.

Solution

Having used Urbio for several years for site prospection and feasibility studies, CKW decided to take things to the next level: by leveraging Urbio’s external API, they enhanced their own public website with interactive, data-driven features to improve customer acquisition and awareness.

Interactive Building Information Retrieval

Urbio’s external API enables CKW’s website visitors to independently check the potential and implied cost for connecting their building to a nearby heating network simply by typing their address. The API returns data such as installed system types, sizes, financial parameters and whether the building is located in a district heating zone. Potential clients quickly understand the specific suitability of district heating for their properties, and get a first cost estimate.

Secure API Authentication and Access

Urbio provides a secure API access through token-based authentication, ensuring data integrity and user authorization. This streamlined the approval and integration into CKW’s own systems.

Benefits

Enhanced Customer Acquisition and Awareness

The API integration significantly improved and streamlined CKW’s ability to promote district heating networks and acquire new customers by providing easily accessible information on their website. After a few months of activity, they saw a strong uptick of inbound requests in the area.

Data-Driven Network Design

The data collected via the website allows the engineering team to adjust network designs and roll-out plans iteratively. This ensures future network expansions are guided by real market data, leading to more efficient, timely and targeted infrastructure development.

Urbio's API fuels our lead generation tool. The adata coming from Urbio allows to automatically evaluate the cost of a connection and quickly prepare a tailored proposal. With Urbio, we digitized our entire acquisition process.

— David Joller, Heat Product Manager, CKW