Abstract
District heating (DH) is an alternative technology to Individual Heating (IH) for satisfying end-user’s needs. This paper assesses the competitiveness of a DH network in the center of Italy from energy, environmental, and economic points of view considering both thermal power plant and end-users’ sides. On the thermal power plant side, the energy analysis considers the Primary Energy Saving (PES) and the specific energy (Esp) of the fuel actually exploited in the thermal power plant compared to its Low Heating Value (LHV), while the environmental analysis considers the avoided CO2 and the economic analysis considers the Energy Efficiency Certificates (EECs). Results showed that the current thermal power plant configuration with two boilers and a Combined Heat and Power (CHP) unit reaches a yearly PES of 21.3% as well as 1099 tCO2 avoided. From the economic analysis of the thermal power plant side, 829 EECs with an economic return of 207,222€ are obtained, while from the end-users’ side the DH network is cheaper than IH in 84.7% of the cases. Further technologies are also studied to enhance the CHP unit flexibility.
Highlights
Climate change has become a serious issue that is affecting the whole world
Only the gas boilers operate in the summer season, while in the mid-season the Combined Heat and Power (CHP) unit has the priority over the boilers: this is clear in Table 5 when comparing the columns related to the “CHP unit Thermal Energy production” and to the “Boiler Thermal Energy production”, 13 of 25 respectively
A comparison between the current and the previous (with Individual Heating (IH)) configurations of a District Heating (DH) network located in the center of Italy has been carried out from energy, environmental, and economic points of view
Summary
Climate change has become a serious issue that is affecting the whole world. Nowadays, increasingly stringent strategies and solutions are needed more than ever to tackle this problem. Energy-consuming technologies, as well as the use of conventional fossil fuel sources, have a fundamental impact on the global environment: the previous decade was the warmest period ever recorded so far, with a global average temperature of 1.1 ◦C above pre-industrial levels [1]. Global warming, caused by human activities, is continuously rising by 0.2 ◦C per decade, and this will lead to considerable impacts on both Earth’s environment and living beings when an overall increase of 2 ◦C compared to the temperature in pre-industrial times will be achieved [1]. With firstly the Paris Agreement and the Clean Energy Package, Europe has committed itself to achieve by 2030 the ambitious goal to increase energy efficiency up to 32.5%, the exploitation of renewables up to 32%, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions down to at least 40% [3]. Renewable energy is expected to be widely used in electricity, heating, cooling, and transportation by 2050, creating about 10 million additional direct jobs within the EU countries [5,6,7]
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