A Supply/demand Decision Making-tool for the Regional Coordinated Planning of Thermal Networks

The development of urban areas by densification of the existing urban infrastructure and setting up of new dwellings raises the question of spatial and temporal distribution of energy supplies to provide thermal comfort. Urban development projects are indeed not necessarily coordinated and may unexpectedly appear, either through new building projects or by opportunistic study of key area, or by motivation of public or private actors. The aim of the proposed methodology is to generate optimum scenarii matching, in a long term perspective, the load and temperature levels of heat supply sources and thermal demand of urban areas. It uses energy integration techniques to simulate the thermal energy portfolios, taking into consideration the possibility to increase the supply temperature levels of energy supply sources using heat pumps. The results from simulation are expressed as thermal load curves and a network-diagram connecting urban areas, energy supply sources and heat pumps. Although many points of view might be considered for the correlation between urban thermal energy supply and demand, some criteria, such as exergy losses, CO2 emissions, costs and the amount of renewable energy, are strictly quantitative and can be optimized by mathematical programming. The associated tool is validated on a simple case study and applied for the regional coordinated thermal energy planning of an urban area in Geneva, using six temporal horizon up to year 2100.