A novel approach to district heating and cooling network design based on life cycle cost optimization

Comprehensive Sustainability Assessment of Regenerative Actions on the Thermal Envelope of Obsolete Buildings under Climate Change Perspective

“…However, in sociocultural and climatic contexts like that proposed by this research, these actions represent an important degree of the technification of construction processes, which currently does not have enough roots in the productive fabric as well as a high cost in relation to the savings that could be obtained, essentially due to lower demand from buildings in the operational phase [18]. Whereas, as will be pointed out in this article, a certain degree of systematization and prefabrication of interventions on buildings will allow, in urban contexts integrated with similar typological and constructive solutions, an optimization of intervention costs and a necessary reduction of energy demand that will favor the promotion of integrated community energy systems [19] and/or the construction of district heating and cooling networks [20].…”

“…The methodology that the ITEC uses to calculate the data that we used is based mainly on the determination of some percentages of recycled content and raw material that constitute each of the unit elements, which have associated values for their energy cost (MJ) and CO 2 emissions into the atmosphere; characteristics of the CDWs and their amount generated on-site, mainly aimed at site management, and, finally, the percentage of material recycled from the product, in order to obtain the emissions savings from the use of certain materials [56] (pp. [18][19][20][21][22]. In the case of the two main characterized indicators, the results obtained for each of them started either from the consideration of the most representative values for said material through reference databases [62] or, if available, data directly provided by the manufacturer.…”

“…In this regard, it is worth underlining the importance of more easily dissipating internal loads through the enclosure. In a context such as the one given, this highlights, on one hand, the importance of the materials used for the renovation and its ability to modify its transmissivity in warm periods [41] and, on the other hand, the need to advance in the definition of decentralized energy models based on the use of renewable sources to meet the future demands of residential estates [19,20] that, as we have seen, will increase.…”

Review on District Cooling and Its Application in Energy Systems

“…• Heat loss within the plant itself as well as the building serviced by the DHC due to distribution losses in pipes and heat exchangers is inevitable [41,42].…”

Masterplanner: A Central Utility Plant Design and Optimization Tool

“…Some tools are designed to provide limited insights on selecting a set of thermal/electrical supply technologies at a high level, e.g. SAM (Blair et al 2014), PVWatts (Dobos 2014), and ReOpt (Simpkins et al 2014), also some frameworks have been developed for this purpose as studied by Snoek et al (2002), Rezaie and Rosen (2012), and Best et al (2019). However, these tools and frameworks mostly act as recommendation systems with high-level optimization capabilities: they lack an integrated approach to detailed design of both cooling and heating supply equipment.…”