Techno-economical study of heat pumps in eco-district planning and design

Abstract

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.