Comparing district heating options under uncertainty using stochastic ordering

District heating is expected to play an important role in the decarbonisation of the energy sector in the coming years since low carbon sources such as waste heat and biomass are increasingly being used to generate heat. The design of district heating often has competing objectives: the need for inexpensive energy and meeting low carbon targets. In addition, the planning of district heating schemes is subject to multiple sources of uncertainty, such as variability in heat demand and energy prices. This paper proposes a decision support tool to analyse and compare system designs for district heating under uncertainty using stochastic ordering (dominance) so that decision-makers can make robust decisions. The uncertainty in input parameters of the energy system model together with general scenarios are introduced to generate distributions of net present costs and emissions for each design. To perform inference about the induced distributions of outputs, we apply the orderings in the mean and dispersion. The proposed approach is demonstrated in an application to the waste heat recovery problem in district heating in Brunswick, Germany. The results obtained show that heat pump, a low carbon design option, is more robust in comparison to combined heat and power (CHP) and a mix of CHP and heat pump under all three scenarios, highlighting that robustness is an attractive feature of low-temperature waste heat recovery. (c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Automated summary

This study proposes a decision support tool for district heating system design, using stochastic ordering to analyze and compare different designs, allowing decision-makers to make robust decisions. The results show that heat pump is a more robust low-carbon design option for waste heat recovery in district heating.