| Title | Assessment of heating and cooling demand of buildings as part of a regional analysis of shallow geothermal potential |
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| Authors | Burger, Urich, Sitzenfrei, Rauch |
| Year | 2013 |
| Conference | European Geothermal Conference |
| Keywords | sustainability, GIS data, energy management, primary energy, renewable energy, efficiency, CO2 emissions, thermal rehabilitation measures |
| Abstract | Existing studies on the potential of shallow geothermal energy mostly deal with the technical capacity of gaining energy out of the underground and do not take into account other limiting factors such as e.g. regeneration of the underground, local energy demand or housing patterns. Looking at a comprehensive utilisation of geothermal installations it is also of high importance to focus on negative effects due to interactions between those installations. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the energy demand and load for heating and cooling not only for an area but on a buildings level. Due to data privacy, lack and poor quality of existing data, gaining the required input values for the calculation of the heating and cooling demand is often not feasible or at least cumbersome. In this paper, the authors present a methodology to determine the energy demand for heating and cooling of buildings with a minimum of input data. The estimated demand is used to assess a sustainable shallow geothermal utilisation of the underground on a regional basis. Although the presented software tool is developed to get input data for potential studies on shallow geothermal energy, there is a larger field of applications to investigate the effects of heating energy management in a settlement area. To show the possible range of applications of the tool, an alpine village was chosen for a study on effects of thermal rehabilitation measures at buildings and its influence on shallow geothermal installations, primary energy demand, additional electrical energy demand, quote of renewable energy and CO2 emissions. For the case study it is shown that it is advisable to force the redevelopment of buildings with a construction year up to 1980 to lower the total primary energy demand for heating. Rehabilitation of newer buildings only has a marginal effect in the reduction of heating energy consumption and thus is economically not worthwhile. The results also indicate to do further investigation to decide whether geothermal installations or alternative energy sources such as biomass are the best choice to raise the quotient of renewable energy in the total primary energy demand. |