Assessment of Total Operating Costs for a Geothermal District Heating System

Abstract

District heating system (DHS), especially geothermal, is an important class of heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems. This is due to the fact that in many countries and regions of the world, they have been successfully installed and operated, resulting in great economic savings. In recent years, such systems have received much attention with regard to improving their energy efficiency, equipment operation, and investment cost. Improvement in performance of a geothermal district heating system (GDHS) is a very effective mean to decrease energy consumption and to provide energy saving. To perform the potential energy savings in a GDHS, the advanced exergoeconomic analysis is applied to a real GDHS in the city of Afyon/Turkey. Then, it is evaluated based on the concepts of exergy destruction cost and investment cost. The results show that the advanced exergoeconomic analysis makes the information more accurate and useful and supplies additional information that cannot be provided by the conversional analysis. Furthermore, the Afyon GDHS can be made more cost effectiveness, removing the system components’ irreversibilities, technical-economic limitations, and poorly chosen manufacturing methods.