engleski

Levelized Cost of Excess Heat Method for the Assessment of its Utilisation in District Heating Systems

To fulfil the climate neutrality goals of the European Union, as set out in the Green Deal, it is necessary to move towards sustainable energy solutions in all the subsectors of the energy sector. This is especially relevant for heating, which is responsible for 80% of the final energy consumption in the European buildings. However, 64% of the heating demand is currently covered by the fossil fuels, which shows the urgent need to act. In high density heat areas, district heating has already proven to be a sustainable solution since it enables the utilisation of renewable energy sources and the use of highly efficient production technologies. Nevertheless, most of these systems still use fossil fuels, which shows the high need for transferring to the sustainable, low temperature 4th generation district heating systems of the future. The main heat sources for these systems would be renewables such as solar thermal, geothermal and biomass, but also excess heat sources, which represent heat produced during the certain industrial or service sector process and wasted in the environment. Excess heat sources have shown to have a high technical potential in the European Union and other countries and continents. Some sources even report that the amount of available excess heat in Europe is high enough to cover the demand of both the households and tertiary buildings. Despite it, this source remains underutilised and the research in this area is scarce. In this thesis, the feasibility of excess heat utilisation in district heating systems was analysed by developing and implementing the levelized cost of excess heat method. The method was used to show the spatial feasibility of these sources for both high temperature and low temperature excess heat. The impact of certain parameters of the levelized cost of heat (including the capacity factor in different system configuration and the temperature level of the excess heat source) has been analysed to show their effect on the overall feasibility of this source. Furthermore, the importance of using dedicated thermal storage units for excess heat to increase their utilisation and subsequently the feasibility has been analysed and discussed. Finally, the participation of high and low temperature excess heat sources on the wholesale heat market has been studied, specifically calculating their feasibility by using levelized cost of excess heat. The results of this thesis show the high potentials of excess heat sources from the economic perspective, but also emphasize the need for shifting towards the 4th generation district heating to make the low temperature excess heat utilisation feasible.

district heating ; excess heat ; levelized cost of excess heat ; energy planning ; renewable energy sources ; heat market

nije evidentirano