An intelligent design and environmental consideration of a green-building system utilizing biomass and solar having a bidirectional interaction with the grid to achieve a sustainable future

Abstract

As a result of climate change and environmental pollutants becoming more prevalent in the environment, this paper introduces an innovative approach to energy systems that uses smart building technologies and renewable energy sources to mitigate climate change and promote sustainability. The central concept of this method is to hybridize solar and biomass resources in order to meet the heating, cooling, and electricity needs of a residential neighborhood over the year. The system is driven by an intelligent design of photovoltaic thermal panels combined with an efficient heater. This idea reduces the solar system cost and increases the independency from the local heating and cooling networks when the sun is unavailable. Besides, the waste heat recovery process is introduced to utilize the additional heat to charge the chiller and space heating demand and avoid releasing excess heat into the environment as much as possible. Multiple controllers are employed to launch a bidirectional connection with the electricity grid to sell or buy energy to or from the grid based on production, demand, and usage. The system’s affordability, effectiveness, and environmental sustainability are assessed comprehensively via TRNSYS software and MATLAB-developed code. According to the results, the proposed smart system achieves a very low emission rate of 14 kg.CO2/MWh with an affordable energy cost of 76.3 $/MWh. The results further reveal that while the system chiefly depends on biomass in cold hours to meet the heating demand, most of the building’s cooling need is provided by the photovoltaic thermal panels in summer, signifying the importance of renewable energy resources combination. It is noteworthy that due to the combination of green energy sources, the amount of carbon dioxide emission is significantly reduced by 35%. In addition, the net electricity is positive 2300 h of the year, meeting the demand, charging the chiller and tank, and seeling the additional to the grid, offsetting a significant portion of the annual energy costs. The results eventually showed that while the minimum energy cost of 79 $/MWh was obtained in April, the performance efficiency and emission rate reached the maximum and minimum values of 41.5% and 10.5 kg.CO2/MWh in December.