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Geothermal district heating --- Economic aspects

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Systems engineering. --- District heating --- Dynamic programming

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EU energy policy is more and more promoting a resilient, efficient and sustainable energy system. Several agreements have been signed in the last few months that set ambitious goals in terms of energy efficiency and emission reductions and to reduce the energy consumption in buildings. These actions are expected to fulfill the goals negotiated at the Paris Agreement in 2015. The successful development of this ambitious energy policy needs to be supported by scientific knowledge: a huge effort must be made in order to develop more efficient energy conversion technologies based both on renewables and fossil fuels. Similarly, researchers are also expected to work on the integration of conventional and novel systems, also taking into account the needs for the management of the novel energy systems in terms of energy storage and devices management. Therefore, a multi-disciplinary approach is required in order to achieve these goals. To ensure that the scientists belonging to the different disciplines are aware of the scientific progress in the other research areas, specific Conferences are periodically organized. One of the most popular conferences in this area is the Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (SDEWES) Series Conference. The 12th Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems Conference was recently held in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The present Special Issue of Energies, specifically dedicated to the 12th SDEWES Conference, is focused on five main fields: energy policy and energy efficiency in smart energy systems, polygeneration and district heating, advanced combustion techniques and fuels, biomass and building efficiency.

district heating and cooling --- sustainable development --- renewable energy --- smart cities

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Geothermal resources --- Geothermal district heating --- Ground source heat pump systems --- Economic aspects

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In the context of the Paris Agreement, the three Belgian regions have for objective to move towards the European objective of carbon neutrality by 2050. The reduction of the emission levels in the building sector is one of the elements proposed in the Belgian long-term low greenhouse gas emission development strategy. One way to achieve it is to use carbon-neutral energy sources for heat and hot water production such as heat pumps, district heating, etc. In parallel to this strategy, the eco-district concept characterized by its increasing energy performance is more and more present in urban planning. The goal of this study is to identify the possible environmental and economical benefits that can be obtained by installing heat pumps in eco-districts compared to traditional natural gas heating technologies. To do so, several heating system configurations including district heating
and storage are studied. These configurations are simulated thanks to an advanced simulation and optimization tool and compared through their total discounted cost and total CO2 emission. The simulations performed cover the effect of the centralization, storage, eco-district energy level and size, distances inside the eco-district, dual hourly electricity rate, natural gas and electricity price variation, CO2 taxes, subsidies, Dutch commodity prices and carbon emitted by the electricity production. The simulations performed show that the air source heat pump cases are almost twice as expensive as the natural gas condensing boiler ones when Belgian commodity prices are applied. Different economical ways to promote heat pumps in eco-districts are investigated. Concerning the environmental benefit, the air source heat pumps have very low carbon emissions compared to natural gas condensing boilers.

Heat pump --- eco-district --- carbon neutrality --- district heating --- heating system --- storage --- Ingénierie, informatique & technologie > Energie