Journal
ENERGY CONVERSION AND MANAGEMENT
Volume 236, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.enconman.2021.114041
Keywords
Self-sufficient district; Techno-economic analysis; Positive energy district; Net-zero energy district; Renewable energy; Optimization
Categories
Funding
- Academy of Finland - Strategic Research Council (SRC) project Smart Energy Transition (SET) Realizing Its Potential for Sustainable Growth for Finland's Second Century [314325]
- VTT's internal project Intelligence in Structures
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Many cities and districts face technical and economic challenges in achieving energy self-sufficiency, with a focus on wind power investments and potential cost reductions by lowering self-sufficiency rates. Positive Energy District or Net-Zero Energy District may be more feasible goals to target instead of full energy self-sufficiency.
Many cities and districts have announced that their ultimate goal is to be energy self-sufficient, but there are many technical and economic challenges that are required to be studied. The aim of this study is to find costoptimal technical solutions for districts with high energy self-sufficiency rates that can cover their electricity demand. Two methods are applied, a rule-based method and an optimization method, to find the renewable energy system capacities for local centralized wind power, solar photovoltaic, battery, heat storage and heat pump in a district with a minimum life cycle cost. The Kalasatama district in Helsinki-Finland, is taken as a case study. The results show that the full energy self-sufficiency target requires very high investments in the renewable energy systems. For the studied case, reducing the self-sufficiency rate to 76% can bring down the life cycle cost by 66% and achieve a net-zero annual energy balance. It is economically and technically more feasible to aim achieving Positive Energy District or Net-Zero Energy District instead of full energy self-sufficiency. Based on the obtained results, the main investment should be made in wind power, due to its higher utilization rate around the year compared to solar photovoltaic. Investments in the expensive centralized battery storage sharply drops when the self-sufficiency rate is reduced from 100%. It is revealed that due to the high population density and limited availability of renewables, the physical boundary of a district may not fit the required renewable energy installations if high self-sufficiency is targeted. This will frequently lead to expanding the district boundary towards a virtual balancing boundary.
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