Research on three-part heating cost method based on heating consumption reallocation and game theory

Abstract

Household heat metering is significant in building energy conservation, but current cost policy (basic and variable costs) in northern China is not easy to implement for two reasons: a corner user has greater heating consumption than a center user, and the marginal heating cost of high-temperature users increases sharply with adjacent room heat transfer. To solve these problems, this study proposes a fair heating cost policy using a residential building in Tianjin, China as the research object. The EnergyPlus model is validated with measured results and used to generate the heating reallocation for corner and center users. Additional cost based on game theory is introduced to eliminate the adjacent room heat transfer problem. The new three-part heating cost method including basic, variable, and additional heating costs produces a fair cost condition for all users. A corner user with normal heat can realize savings of up to 307.8 RMB (4.3 RMB/m2) with reallocation of public heating consumption; the heating cost for low-temperature “steal heat” users may increase by 281.9 RMB (3.9 RMB/m2) in one heating season. This feasible method provides a specific calculation process that increases the fairness of heating cost, which is vital to future promotion of household heat metering.