Abstract
The decarbonisation of residential heat through integration with the power system and deployment of refurbishment policies is at the core of European energy policies. Yet, heat-electricity integration may be challenged, in practice, by the large variability of heat demand across weather years. Current approaches for residential heat demand simulation fail to provide insights about the extent of such variability across many weather years and about the benefits potentially brought about by nearly zero-energy buildings. To fill this gap, this work develops an open-source space-heating demand simulation workflow that is applicable to any country's building stock. The workflow, based on a well-established lumped-parameter thermodynamic model, allows capturing sub-national weather-year variability and the mitigation effects of refurbishment. For Italy, different weather years lead to variations in heat demand up to 2 TWh/day, lasting for several days. Moreover, some weather regimes produce spatial asymmetries that may further complicate heat-electricity integration. The refurbishment of about 55% of buildings constructed before 1975 could substantially mitigate such oscillations, leading to a 31–37% reduction of yearly heat demand, primarily in colder regions. Intra-day heat demand variations, driven by user behaviour, are not substantially impacted by refurbishment, calling for the simultaneous deployment of flexible heat generating technologies.
Highlights
The achievement of internationally-agreed climate mitigation targets requires a rapid and deep decarbonisation of all energy end uses [1]
The residential heat sector is at the core of European Union (EU) decarbonisation long-term plans, aiming at increasing the rate of refurbishment of existing buildings in the direction of nearly zero-energy buildings (NZEBs) [3], and at achieving deeper penetrations of highly-efficient and flexible
In the absence of metered hourly data at the country scale, the model is compared against estimates of yearly space heating consumption by Eurostat [26], available for years in the range
Summary
The achievement of internationally-agreed climate mitigation targets requires a rapid and deep decarbonisation of all energy end uses [1]. In the European Union (EU), aiming to be carbon-neutral by 2050, up to 25% of the total final energy consumption is associated with end uses in residential buildings, with space heating loads largely dominating, with a share of about 64.1%, over water heating (14.8%), electricity for lighting and appliances (14.4%), cooking (5.6%) and cooling (0.3%) [2]. The foreseen increasing interconnection of power production and residential space-heating supply via P2H, raises some challenges. The electrification of residential space-heating demand would represent an additional, large source of weatherinduced variability that might challenge systems’ adequacy e for those countries, such as Italy, that exhibit marked differences of weather regimes across their sub-national entities and bottlenecks in the transmission of electricity between those. To allow a conjoint study of heat demand and renewable generation patterns and support a frictionless coupling of power generation and residential space-heating supply, it is critical to provide quantitative insights around the following unanswered research questions: 1. To what extent and at what temporal scale (e.g., hours, days) can residential space-heating demand vary across weather years, at a country scale?
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