engleski

Scenario analysis of the renewable district heating system in Ozalj, a small city in Croatia

Heating and cooling represents the most intensive energy sector in the European Union, accounting for around 50 % of its final energy consumption. Therefore, this sector has significant potentials to increase the energy efficiency, while reducing the primary energy consumption. Nevertheless, district heating systems are currently distributed in a rather uneven fashion in the European Union, covering a minor share of the overall heating demand. Furthermore, small renewable district heating systems are practically neglected, especially in the South- Eastern Europe. When managed properly, these systems have a number of potential benefits, including enhancement of the local employment and the security of the supply, increase of the local economy, use of various heat sources (e.g. biomass, solar collectors, excess heat, geothermal energy), etc. District heating will be also very important for future smart energy systems by enabling the integration of the power and heating/cooling sectors with the use of power- to-heat technologies and thermal storage. It is necessary to support and promote these concepts in order to achieve primary energy savings and reduction of environmental impact of the heating and cooling sectors. This is one of the main goals of the CoolHeating project (www.coolheating.eu), funded by Horizon2020 programme (grant agreement No 691679), which aims to support the implementation of "small modular renewable district heating and cooling grids" for communities in South-Eastern Europe. The final outcome of the project will be the initiation of new renewable district heating projects in 5 target communities up to the investment stage. This paper will provide a brief description of the CoolHeating project and an overview of the techno-economic analysis carried out for the heating sector in the city of Ozalj which is one of the target cities in Croatia. The first step in the analysis was to map the heat demand in Ozalj, in order to define areas of the city which are most suitable for a small district heating system. Input data for this have been gathered by a survey implemented as a part of the CoolHeating project. By analysing the results, two alternative district heating distributions have been proposed and evaluated. Furthermore, a techno-economic analysis has been conducted for two production facility alternatives and the environmental impact of the proposed system has been compared to the current situation. Heat demand mapping has been done by utilising Matlab and qGIS software, while Microsoft Excel and Matlab have been used to calculate the economic and environmental aspects of the analysed system.

district heating ; renewable energy ; heat demand mapping ; techno-economic analysis ; environmental impact

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