Browsing by Author "Grahn, Elina"

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Affärsmodeller för värmebaserade energisystem
(2014-12-09) Grahn, Elina
Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu | Bachelor's thesis
Future district energy systems
(2016-12-12) Grahn, Elina
Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
In order to mitigate climate change, the energy systems need to change. Fossil fuels need to be replaced by various low carbon energy sources, the energy consumption need to be reduced and the efficiency of the whole system needs to be improved. However, the energy systems are complex and there is not a single right solution for how to meet these requirements. In this thesis, a scenario approach was used to investigate the outcome of different energy system selections. The thesis is a combination of a literature review and a simulation case study. In the literature review, different development pathways for district energy systems and methods for developing and evaluating scenarios were reviewed. Based on these results, three scenarios for the development of the district energy system in Keski-Uusimaa area were made. The timeframe of the scenarios was 20 years, starting in 2015 and ending in 2035. In the scenarios, a common assumption for the development of the building stock was used while the deployment rates of decentralized heating technologies varied. The heating technologies were restricted to district heating, ground source heat pumps and solar thermal collectors. In order to examine how the heat demand in the area developed over the scenario timeframe, the scenarios were simulated using a dynamic simulation model of the area. The outcomes were compared using different technical, environmental, economic and social criteria. According to the results of the case study, the scenario with the lowest deployment rate of decentralised heating technologies was ranked best. However, the differences between the scenarios were in general quite small. Only in the case of the investment costs, the outcome of the best-ranked scenario was significantly better than the outcome of the other scenarios, having a huge effect on the scenario ranking. In the process of developing and comparing scenarios, numerous decisions and assumptions were made. As a consequence, the detailed results were strongly dependent on the chosen parameters. Therefore, the main contribution of the thesis lies in the method used to analyse the energy systems.