Green District Heating Systems

Emil Peter Rysholt & Mathias Callø Gjøl

Master Thesis - Energy Technology - 2019

District heating in Denmark currently faces a significant challenge in phasing in renewable production into the system in order to achieve the political goals. Numerous renewable district heating production technologies are available but determining which to invest in can be difficult as the framework for the sector is complex. Therefore, the goal in this thesis was to develop a simple, interactive tool that can be used to analyse future green investments.

To develop the tool, energyPRO has been used to carry out simulations with different combinations of technologies. The results from these simulations were evaluated with regression analysis in order to determine correlations for the results for different combinations of technologies. These correlations establish the foundation for the tool where the user can design heating systems with a simplistic approach and obtain technical results, economic results, resulting damage cost to society and an optimal system configuration.

The tool provides results with a maximum error of 0.49 percent compared to detailed models in energyPRO. Therefore, the user of the tool can more easily analyse different heating systems in order to determine the most optimal solution for any specific situation. This eases the preliminary phase when analysing future green investments.

The thesis and the tool are available for download below. Three versions of the tool are available. The full version of the tool, a light version of the tool which has fewer illustrations but operates more smoothly on some computers and lastly an open version of the tool where the user can access all sheets, inspect the background data in detail and implement changes.