Methodology to compare and optimize district heating and decentralized heat supply for energy transformation on a municipality level

The determination of the optimal energy supply system and the selection of energy producers are two major challenges in the energy transformation of districts. This paper addresses these issues, presenting a holistic approach to compare and optimize district heating supply and decentralized heat supply, which is applicable to arbitrary districts. For this purpose, load profiles for space heating, domestic hot water and electricity are generated utilizing an archetype approach and statistical data. To identify the most economic supply variant, optimization models are created, using the Open Energy Modelling Framework. The optimization results are compared and the most economic supply variant is identified. The method is demonstrated with a case study of a district with a heat density of 491.15 kW h/(m2 a), considering different emission reduction targets and energy costs. The results show that, for a district with these properties, district heating has lower levelized costs of heating than decentralized heat supply for 94% of the investigated variants. The difference lies between 0.002 euro/kWh and 0.135euro/kWh, depending on energy prices and emission reduction target. In the future, the developed method will be used to investigate the influence of various district characteristics on the economic efficiency of supply variants.

Automated summary

This paper presents a holistic approach to compare and optimize district heating supply and decentralized heat supply, and concludes that district heating usually has lower levelized costs of heating than decentralized heat supply in specific districts.