Suchergebnisse

In the progRESsHEAT project, six local cases are analysed. The main objective of the progRESsHEAT project is to support policy makers and public authorities at local, regional and national level in the development and implementation of integrated strategies and policies to enforce the use of renewable and efficient heating and cooling solutions in their regions.The main pillar of the strategy development process are local case studies for six municipalities. The goal of these case studies is to develop heating and cooling strategies through a profound analysis of (1) heating and cooling demands with respect to future developments, (2) long-term potentials of renewable energies and waste heat in the regions, (3) barriers & drivers and (4) a model based assessment of policy intervention in scenarios up to 2050 together with the authorities.For this purpose we apply a geographic information system (GIS) and map the energy demands based on modelling of buildings and industry, the potential RE sources (including biomass, solar, geothermal, etc.) as well as waste heat sources and the existing energy production plants locally for each municipality. The district energy system of each municipality is then modelled in a coherent energy system analysis tool (EnergyPRO) which combines the detailed demand side modelling with the geographical overview of the resources and the existing production plants. The costs of providing district energy is then entered into acost curve tool where the cheapest solution is found, depending on the location and type of building, comparing 1) district energy costs to 2) costs of increased energy efficiency and 3) costs of individual energy solutions. Thereby, the most cost effective solutions to increase RES heating and cooling at local level are identified.Recent results from the local case studies will be presented, illustrating business cases for district heating in different regions in EU as well as the key success factors and main challenges and barriers for increased efficiency and sustainability of the European heating and cooling sector.

Municipal solid waste has seen increasing annual volumes for many decades in contemporary Europe and constitutes, if not properly managed, an environmental problem due to local pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. From an energy perspective, waste is also an alternative fuel for power and heat generation; energy recovery from waste represents an effective measure to reduce landfilling and avoid disposal emissions while simultaneously reducing the equivalent demand for primary energy supply. A key factor for obtaining the full synergetic benefits of this energy recovery is the presence of local heat distribution infrastructures, without which no large-scale recovery and utilisation of excess heat is possible. In this paper, which aims to estimate municipal solid waste volumes available for heat recovery in European district heating systems in 2030, a literature and data review is performed to establish and assess current and future EU (European Union) waste generation and management. Main conclusions are that more heat can be recovered from current Waste-to-Energy facilities operating at low average heat recovery efficiencies, that efficient incineration capacity is geographically concentrated, and that waste available for heat recovery in 2030 is equally determined by total generation volumes by this year as by future EU deployment levels of district heating.

Micro-Combined Heat and Power systems may contribute to changing the energy system at the residential level. Being a part of a distributed generation system, the stationary fuel cells constitute a promising element in a potentially sustainable and environmentally friendly energy system. Fuel cell based microCHP will be able to contribute to an innovative system where the customer produces his own heat and partly his own electricity. Furthermore, stationary fuel cells as a part of a distributed generation system are also regarded as a potential to improve the national security of supply as well as increase the national competitiveness. The stationary fuel cell technology is still in a rather early stage of development and faces a long list of challenges and barriers of which some are linked directly to the technology through the need of cost decrease and reliability improvements. Others are linked to the political stage, where the necessary support schemes have to be in place in combination with guarantees that the political objectives for the future energy system does not change dramatically. One of the main challenges of the fuel cell technology is the efficiency while others are the cost as well as the reliability of the fuel cell. It is questionable if investors such as households or energy companies are willing to engage in the fuel cell technology before these conditions have improved. In order to assure actual market penetration of fuel cells, political objectives, which will contribute to assuring that the investors face long term planning perspectives and regulation in the field has to be clear and contribute to creating the market opportunities e.g. through investments in R&D. In this work package, we address the issues of necessary support schemes and the effect on the future energy system. If the single countries should opt to support stationary fuel cells, we find that in Denmark it would be promising to apply the net metering based support scheme for households with an electricity consumption exceeding the electricity production from the fuel cell. In France and Portugal the most promising support scheme is price premium when the fuel cell is run as a part of a virtual power plant. From a system perspective, it appears that it is more important which kind of energy system (represented by country) the FC's are implemented in, rather than which operation strategy is used. In an energy system with lots of fossil fuel (Denmark and Portugal), the potential CO2 emission reductions are relatively large compared to an energy system dominated by e.g. fossil-free nuclear.

The Danish government has set ambitious targets regarding the future exploitation of renewable energy in the Danish energy system. In many respects, the prospective increase in renewable energy resources (RES) will substantially impact the entire future Danish energy system. Renewable gas is a fuel that can contribute to the sustainable transition towards an energy system independent of fossil fuels in the longterm. This study investigates the role of renewable gas production in a renewable based Danish energy system. To facilitate the modelling of renewable gas, improvements of the structure in the spatiotemporal optimization model OptiFlow is carried out. The OptiFlow model is hard-linked to the existing energy system model Balmorel, allowing modelling the gas chain from up-stream renewable gas production, through storage facilities to end consumers. Balmorel is a bottom-up, deterministic, partial equilibrium model, which minimizes systems costs under perfect market conditions. The developments in OptiFlow enable modelling of various processing technologies, e.g. biological- and thermal- gasification as well as electrolysis technologies. The co-simulation of OptiFlow and Balmorel leads to the socio-economic optimal system, where investments and operations optimization is facilitated for the integrated electricity, district heating, and gas system. The results of this study show that production of RE-gas is socio-economically attractive in all the investigated scenarios. Furthermore, the results show that RE-gas directly injected into the natural gas pipeline network is preferred. The analysis show that geographical allocation of resources has an impact on the results. Moreover, it was shown that hydrogen was not produced in periods with high electricity prices.

Denmark has more than 10 years' of experience with a wind share of approximately 20 per cent. During these 10 years, electricity markets have been subject to developments with a key focus on integrating wind power as well as trading electricity with neighbouring countries. This article introduces a methodology to analyse and understand the current market integration of wind power and concludes that the majority of Danish wind power in the period 2004e2008 was used to meet the domestic demand. Based on a physical analysis, at least 63 per cent of Danish wind power was used domestically in 2008. To analyse the remaining 37 per cent, we must apply a market model to identify cause-effect relationships. The Danish case does not illustrate any upper limit for wind power integration, as also illustrated by Danish political targets to integrate 50 per cent by 2020. In recent years, Danish wind power has been financed solely by the electricity consumers, while maintaining production prices below the EU average. The net influence from wind power has been as low as 1e3 per cent of the consumer price. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.