Abstract
Cities demand vast amounts of energy for their everyday operation, resulting in significant degradation of energy in the form of heat in the urban environment. This leads to high cooling requirements in cities, while also presenting the opportunity to reuse such waste heat in order to provide low-carbon heating for buildings and processes. Among the many potential energy sources that could be exploited in urban areas, underground railway tunnels are particularly attractive, as the operation of the trains produce considerable amounts of heat throughout the year. This paper reviews how secondary energy sources in urban areas can be integrated into heating and cooling networks, with emphasis on underground rail tunnels. This involves investigating potential urban waste heat sources and the existing state-of-the-art technologies that could be applied to efficiently recover this secondary energy, as well as analyzing how district heating and cooling networks have been a key mechanism to allow for a smooth transition from current fossil fuel based to future low-carbon energy sources.
Highlights
Cities consume about 70% of the world’s resources and are major consumers of energy and significant contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
This paper aims to explore the opportunities of waste heat recovery in the urban environment, with particular focus on recovering heat that is generated in underground railway tunnels, and its distribution through district heating networks (DHNs), showing how the combination of these technologies can become a key tool for changing the provision of heating in the smart cities of the future
This paper focuses on the delivery of heat through district energy systems, showing how district heating can trigger the potential to recover waste heat generated in urban environments
Summary
Cities consume about 70% of the world’s resources and are major consumers of energy and significant contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Building being related to heating [6] This shows the potential that decarbonization of heating and investments in energy efficiency could have in achieving the their construction processes account for around 40% of global CO2 emissions and 36% of final energy world’suse, energy with targets. 36% of building energy consumption being related to heating [6] This shows the potential impact that decarbonization of heating and investments in energy efficiency could have in achieving. In Europe, according to the authors of [7], around 50% of the energy consumed in 2015 was for water Despite representing such a vast proportion of energy use, only 19.1% of the heating and heating and cooling purposes, with nearly 31% being related to space heating and domestic hot water.
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