District heating systems already play an important role in increasing the
sustainability of the heating sector and decreasing its environmental
impact. However, a high share of these systems is old and inefficient and
therefore needs to change towards the 4th generation district heating, which
will incorporate various energy sources, including renewables and excess
heat of different origins. Especially excess heat from industrial and
service sector facilities is an interesting source since its potential has
already been proven to be highly significant, with some researches showing
that it could cover the heat demand of the entire residential and service
sector in Europe. However, most analysis of its utilization in district
heating are not done on the hourly level, therefore not taking into account
the variability of its availability. For that reason, the main goal of this
work was to analyse the integration of industrial excess heat into the
district heating system consisting of different configurations, including
the zero fuel cost technologies like solar thermal. Furthermore,
cogeneration units were a part of every simulated configuration, providing
the link to the power sector. Excess heat was shown to decrease the
operation of peak load boiler and cogeneration, that way decreasing the
costs and environmental effect of the system. However, since its hourly
availability differs from the heat demand, thermal storage needs to be
implemented in order to increase the utilization of this source. The
analysis was performed on the hourly level in the energyPRO software.
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