Abstract
The municipality of Amsterdam has set stringent carbon emission reduction targets: 55% by 2030 and 95% by 2050 for the entire metropolitan area. One of the key strategies to achieve these goals entails a disconnection of all households from the natural gas supply by 2040 and connecting them to the existing city-wide heat grid. This paper aims to demonstrate the value of considering local energy potentials at the city block level by exploring the potential of a rooftop greenhouse solar collector as a renewable alternative to centralized district heating. An existing supermarket and an ATES component complete this local energy synergy. The thermal energy balance of the three urban functions were determined and integrated into hourly energy profiles to locate and quantify the simultaneous and mismatched discrepancies between energy excess and demand. The excess thermal energy extracted from one 850 m2 greenhouse can sustain up to 47 dwellings, provided it is kept under specific interior climate set points. Carbon accounting was applied to evaluate the system performance of the business-as-usual situation, the district heating option and the local system. The avoided emissions due to the substitution of natural gas by solar thermal energy do not outweigh the additional emissions consequential to the fossil-based electricity consumption of the greenhouse’s crop growing lights, but when the daily photoperiod is reduced from 16 h to 12 h, the system performs equally to the business-as-usual situation. Deactivating growth lighting completely does make this local energy solution carbon competitive with district heating. This study points out that rooftop greenhouses applied as solar collectors can be a suitable alternative energy solution to conventional district heating, but the absence of growing lights will lead to diminished agricultural yields.
Highlights
Anthropogenic climate change and gradual depletion of fossil fuels necessitate a transition to sustainable energy systems in cities [1]
This paper evaluates the environmental impact of the built environment by assessing the footprint of CO2e, corresponding to the three main greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere, multiplied by their 100-year global warming potential (GWP), i.e., carbon dioxide (CO2, GWP = 1), methane (CH4, GWP = 28) and nitrous oxide (N2O, GWP = 265)
This paper aimed to demonstrate the value of considering local energy potentials and synergistic design at the city block level by evaluating and comparing the carbon emissions of an alternative scenario: employing a greenhouse solar collector
Summary
Anthropogenic climate change and gradual depletion of fossil fuels necessitate a transition to sustainable energy systems in cities [1]. The Dutch government has committed to the global UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) Paris 2015 climate agreement and has set the challenging nation-wide target of a 49% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 95% by 2050, relative to 1990 levels [3]. One of the strategies to achieve these goals entails a disconnection of all households and commercial buildings from the natural gas supply grid by 2040, which should lead to an annual carbon emission reduction of 370 kton CO2 [5]. Amsterdam policy makers propose to achieve this disconnection by (1) transitioning to all-electric systems (e.g., heat pumps), (2) scaling up biogas production as a direct substitution of natural gas and (3) expanding the existing city heat grid, both by adding more thermal sources from industry or biomass incineration on the supply side as well as connecting more neighborhoods on the receiver side [6]
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