An Energy Transition Pathway Towards Building Decarbonization – Coupling CHP Units With Renewable Energy and Energy Storage Systems

Abstract

Abstract Integration of combined heat and power (CHP) systems, also known as cogeneration, with renewable energy and energy storage along with electrification of buildings is an energy transition pathway to create resilient, efficient, and economic solutions towards decarbonization and a 100% renewable energy system. Designing and optimizing the size of a CHP system to satisfy both electrical power and thermal load of a given facility while minimizing fuel consumption and carbon dioxide production is a challenging problem. The thermal load can consist of a combination of heating, cooling, or hot water production. Integration of renewable energy sources and/or energy storage presents additional design challenges towards a more sustainable solution. An interactive design software was developed by the authors to quickly estimate the performance of different configurations of CHP and renewable energy sources and it was tested for an office complex of 4 commercial buildings found in NREL’s dataset End-Use Load Profiles for the U.S. Building Stock. The software is intended to size CHP devices and calculate the Energy Utilization Factor (EUF), CO2 emissions and the rate of Entropy Production. New features were introduced to the software for this study, including a heat pump module and solar PV with electrical storage. The objective of this paper is to compare different configurations of renewable or low emissions technologies and design an appropriate solution for a test data set for a Typical Metrological Year (TMY). The software requires energy inputs separated by cooling load, heating load and electric demand as a time series and the software is used to optimize the plant size to match all the loads to the corresponding systems.