Renewable energy resources and multi-energy hybrid systems for urban buildings in Nordic climate

Abstract

This research conducts a technical and economicfeasibility study of multi-energy hybrid systems (MEHS)combining differentrenewablesfor a northern climate city of Finland to address issues ofreplacing fossil energy by renewable energy sources (RES) to achieve zero carbon emissions. The renewable energy systems MEHS include geothermal, biomass and solar energy. The selected city-study site is the Olympic Training Center occupied by heterogeneous buildings which presents a good representative urban city for the assessment of theenergy supplyanddemand. A generic and integrated modeling framework grounded in a combination of novel forecasting models for the heterogeneous building energy demands, the splitting of space heatingand hot water use, the coupled renewable energy generation, andthe time series electricity market is developed to investigate optimal MEHS configurations based on the technical and financial analysis. Innovative scenarios of MEHS are developed. The analysis results show that MEHS can flexibly meet the energy demandfor the heterogeneous buildings and theoptimal configurations can be realised by an innovative integration of geothermal and solar sources as well as electricityas complementaryenergy. Model uncertainty and its impacts on the analysis are also considered and discussed.