Accelerating District Heating in Belgium by Resolia
How Resolia Accelerates District Heating in Belgium with Urbio
Resolia‬†evolved‬†from‬†spreadsheet-dependent‬†consultants‬†to‬†data-driven‬†specialists,‬†playing‬†a‬ pivotal role in accelerating next-generation district heating projects across Belgium.‬
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In a country where district heating supplies less than 1% of national heat demand, Resolia has become a driving force behind its growth.
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As the preferred design and technical subcontractor to heating network developer Karno, Resolia's expertise recently helped their client secure over €20 million in competitive public subsidies—funding that catalyzed over €90 million in total investment for low-carbon heating & cooling networks valorizing local renewable sources, connecting buildings from hospitals and commercial centers to residential and industrial sites.
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Their secret weapon? Ditching the old planning playbook entirely—and going digital.
Customer
Resolia
Sector
Consulting firm
Location
Belgium
The Data Challenge
District heating feasibility studies used to be Resolia's nightmare. Picture this: energy engineers spending months manually collecting data on thousands of buildings, armed with nothing but spreadsheets and static maps. Each project meant weeks of door-to-door prospection, painstaking geospatial analysis, and prayer that competitors weren't moving faster.
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"We were basically doing archaeology on every new project," explains Florine Thiry, Energy Engineer at Resolia. "By the time we had solid data, the tender window was closing."
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This manual approach created a brutal bottleneck. In an industry where public tenders move fast and regional subsidies go to the swift, Resolia was losing winnable projects to faster-moving competitors.
Photo: “AI helps us materialize our projects.” Florine Thiry at Resolia’s headquarters.
The Digital Twin Breakthrough
Enter Urbio—a platform that gave Resolia something most energy consultants can only dream of: instant access to nationwide building energy data through digital twins.
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The transformation was immediate. What once took weeks of manual compilation now happens in minutes from their Brussels headquarters. Thiry's team can instantly analyze energy consumption patterns, identify ideal building targets, and map out viable network routes across entire municipalities.
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But the real game-changer wasn't just speed—it was scalability.
Urbio replaces physical door-to-door prospection and greatly accelerates the exploration phase of our heating networks.
— Florine Thiry, Energy Engineer at Resolia
Scaling Expertise Through AI
Resolia's veteran engineers had decades of hard-won knowledge: which buildings make ideal heating targets, which streets to avoid, how demand evolves over time. Previously, this expertise lived in their heads, impossible to replicate across multiple projects simultaneously.
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Urbio's AI-powered "Action Plans" changed that equation. Now Resolia captures their expert rules and patterns in Urbio’s central repository, allowing different team members to instantly apply proven strategies to new projects while customizing for local conditions.
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The result? Layout designs and scenarios that used to take weeks now generate in minutes, letting the team iterate rapidly before making go/no-go decisions.
The Payoff
The digitally-enhanced collaboration between Resolia and Karno has paid off. Karno secured some of Wallonia’s district heating subsidies, a testament to the strength of Resolia’s designs and Urbio’s technology.
The consistent success-rate of Karno in competitive processes helped establish the credibility needed to secure further network investments, including crucial subsidies that made the projects bankable for private investors.​
Urbio brings district heating projects faster to execution, allowing us to create new jobs focused on engineering and construction sites.
— Pierre Baijot, CEO of Resolia
For an industry still dominated by manual processes and lengthy feasibility studies, Resolia's digital-first approach offers a glimpse of what's possible when the energy sector embraces the tools that software companies have been using for years: data-driven insights, scalable workflows, and AI-powered decision-making.
​In a market where timing is everything and margins are tight, that competitive edge is worth its weight in gold—or its equivalent in carbon savings.
“Resolia’s Testimonial - A Glimpse into Digitization”
“Karno wins the majority of Wallonia's subsidies for heating networks”
“A revolutionary tool”
