Business Plan

The Business Plan is a workspace to develop a business model for a 5GDHC network: who benefits and who pays, who owns and operates the network, what motivates customers to connect, and how investments, revenues and risks are distributed. It follows four suggested steps. You can work on them in any order; the progress is counted per step.

The Business Plan is qualitative. You write in your own words, and it does not calculate anything of its own. When the Quick Check is on, its figures are shown read-only for context. Start in the dashboard with a new project or one of the examples.

Step 1: Opportunity

Describe the site or district, the customer segments, the heating and cooling needs, the relevant heat sources and the key pain point. Then explain why a shared low-temperature network offers value compared with the available alternatives, for example individual heat pumps.

You can start from one of the example scenarios or from your own use case. The buildings and the energy sources are shared with the Quick Check: you change them there, and the Business Plan shows them.

Step 2: Business logic

Complete a Business Model Canvas for your use case, with particular attention to the value proposition, customer relationships, key partners, operator responsibilities, cost structure and revenue streams. The canvas also holds the key activities, key resources, channels and customer segments.

Then make the allocation of investment, risk and benefit explicit: for each stakeholder, what they invest, which risk they carry and how they benefit.

Step 3: Reality check

Use rough but transparent assumptions rather than detailed engineering calculations. Test plausible connection rates, tariffs, capital expenditure, financing and subsidy dependencies. Identify the top risks and the top critical assumptions, including one potential deal-breaker, and explain how each could be validated. One risk can be marked as the potential deal-breaker.

Step 4: Implementation

Refine your business model based on the reality check, expert feedback and the challenges you found. Assess its potential for scalability and replication under different geographical, economic and organisational conditions. Then outline the next practical steps: the data to collect, the stakeholders to engage, the partnerships to secure, the pilot opportunities and the key decisions, including a realistic decision gate for moving the concept forward.

Guiding questions

Each step shows guiding questions and tips from the challenge brief and from the learnings of the research project Anergie Leicht Gemacht. For example: Who benefits, and who pays? Who owns and who operates the source, the network and the heat pumps? Connecting is voluntary, so what makes owners say yes? Use what helps.

Example scenarios

Four predefined scenarios can start a Business Plan (BM-SCN-01 to BM-SCN-04). Picking one fills in only what the scenario states. You can change everything afterwards, and the app asks before a scenario replaces text you wrote. You can also describe your own use case instead.

Scenario 01, rural village: private households and a hotel; private ownership, tourist accommodation and commercial use; other partners: the municipality and a ski resort; 20-70 units in phased development; current energy supply not specified.
Scenario 02, urban outskirts with no district heating planned: a secondary school, a kindergarten and multi-family buildings; municipal ownership and rental apartments; other partner: the owner of the educational facilities; about 80 units; current energy supply natural gas.
Scenario 03, urban outskirts with mixed ownership: private homeowners, housing cooperatives, the municipality and educational facilities; condominium ownership (WEG), rental housing (MRG) and non-profit housing (WGG); other partners to be identified; 3-20 buildings; current energy supply natural gas and biomass.
Scenario 04, urban outskirts with a thermal spa and hotels: a thermal spa, hotels and private households; mainly tourism and spa facilities, limited residential use; other partners to be identified; 3-20 buildings; current energy supply natural gas and biomass.

The start screen also offers six illustrative example projects with both modules filled in, four of them based on these scenarios. Opening one creates your own copy.

Pitch readiness (unofficial)

The last step shows how ready your pitch is: how much of the final pitch already has content, from what you filled in. It counts what is filled in, not how good the content is, and it is labelled unofficial.

It checks the six parts of the final pitch (BM-SCOPE-07): the use case and value proposition, the business model, the economic and practical feasibility, the reality check, the scalability and replicability, and the next steps. Next to them it shows the jury criteria proposed in the first version of the challenge brief (BM-SCOPE-08). They are not an official scoring rule.

Each part has a short list of points. A text point counts when its field has text, a list point when it has an entry, and a risk or critical-assumption point when at least one row is complete and no row is half filled. The share of points covered is the score of the part, and the readiness is the average of the six parts. A part is pitch-ready when all its points are covered. There is no equation behind this, and no judgement of the content.

Quick Check figures in the Business Plan

When the Quick Check is on and complete, the Business Plan shows its rough figures for context: the heating and cooling demand, the revenue and the overall investment, next to the buildings, the project area and the selected sources. They are screening values, not a feasibility study, and they are read-only: you change the inputs in the Quick Check. With your own parameters, they carry the "Custom parameters" badge. The sources screened in the Quick Check can be added to the heat sources text with one click.

Comparing business models

A project holds one business model. To compare an alternative, duplicate the project and change the copy.