Design of a District Heating Network and an Energy System in the Industrial Park "Les Hauts-Sarts"

Abstract

In today’s society, attitudes are increasingly evolving towards environmentally responsible consumption. This concerns all kinds of everyday goods, but also energy as the number of micro-grids and local energy communities is in constant expansion.These systems produce their heat and electricity on-site and promote the use of renewable energies. However, such energy systems are in general costly and require an optimal layout in order to guarantee power security of supply while not investing unnecessary huge amounts of money.This work aims at providing a tool capable of designing the best configuration and operation strategy of a smart energy system, comprised of a district heating network and renewable energies. For each outline, the overall costs and the carbon footprint are provided. This could greatly help decision-makers that have to consider several schemes at the initial phases of a project. Moreover, having a linear program, the tool can easily be transposed from a case study to another while keeping its robustness. Three different simulations have been investigated in order to demonstrate the flexibility of the model. The envisaged scenarios enable to study the effect of supply and return temperatures on the optimal design of the heating network. In each case, three different restrictions on CO2emissions have also been considered. Doing so, the goal is to build Pareto curves, which represent the overall costs in function of the quantity of CO2produced. These kinds of curves help to visualise the com-promises between conflicting objectives and can be helpful when designing future energy systems.On the one hand, the results showed that low-temperature district heating networks were best-suited if the main goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, if the attention is rather put on reducing costs, higher supply temperatures at 90°C better fit this motivation. In any case, mid supply temperatures of 70°C were found to be less beneficial.