Roadmaps for heating and cooling system transitions seen through uncertainty and sensitivity analysis

Journal article, 2023

Future district heating systems should enable efficient and economic energy supply, which can be achieved by lowering the system temperatures and boosting it at demand-side. Current solutions include the ultra-low-temperature district heating (ULTDH) and fifth generation district heating and cooling (5GDHC) systems. The transition towards these systems is subject to multiple future uncertainties such as the energy price, investment cost, and demand changes, which were missing in previous works. To investigate the effects of these uncertainties on conclusions brought by established design roadmaps for future DHCs, a five-step framework, which combines the energy system optimization with stochastic simulations, uncertainty analysis and sensitivity assessment, is developed in this study. The framework is applied on a hypothetical 0.25 km2 square district with varying uncertain parameters. Based on stochastic cases, the index named cost-saving probability (CSP) is utilized to reflect the potential of being economic attractive when comparing the energy systems. For the transition towards the ULTDHC, 5GDHC, and individual systems, the most sensitive factors for the CSP are the area demand density, overlapping heating and cooling demand, and linear demand density, respectively. The investment in thermal energy storage (TES) becomes important only when the integration of a larger share of renewable energy is targeted. A roadmap summarizing the promoting and hindering factors for the system transition is provided, pointing out the future focus area for DHC design. The results from the sensitivity analysis also revealed the limited role of TES in integrating variable renewable energy in high-efficiency DHC systems.