Combined heat and power: street-level domestic microgrids

Papafragkou, A., James, P.A.B., Jentsch, M.F. and Bahaj, A.S. (2009) Combined heat and power: street-level domestic microgrids. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Energy, 162 (3), 131-141. (doi:10.1680/ener.2009.162.3.131).

Abstract

Residential housing in the UK accounts for about a quarter of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. The major component of these emissions is associated with space heating, predominantly from gas. District heating schemes, at the community level, using combined heat and power (CHP) have the potential to deliver significant savings in carbon dioxide emissions. This paper considers various CHP schemes at both the individual house and the microgrid street level, where a cluster of up to ten houses are considered as a linked network. It seeks to address the benefits that may arise from each CHP scheme compared with a business as usual (BaU) scenario of individual condensing boilers and electricity from the utility grid. Three different types of housing stock condition have been combined with a range of occupancy profiles to produce a portfolio of hot water and space heating demand scenarios for two locations in the UK. Climate change adapted test reference year weather files have been applied to hourly timestep, domestic building stock simulations. It is shown that a housing cluster in conjunction with a ‘multi-stage’ CHP system may enable small-scale CHP technologies to deliver significant carbon and running cost savings over the BaU scenario.

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Contributors

Author: P.A.B. James

Author: A.S. Bahaj

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