Comparative tool for renewable thermal solutions, based on hourly demand profiles

Challenge Description: The decarbonization of existing buildings plays a key role in achieving overall climate neutrality goals, as they are currently responsible for 40% of energy demand and 36% of CO2 emissions in Europe. This demand is mainly derived from heating, cooling, and domestic hot water systems. In order to boost decarbonization strategies ambitious goals have been defined at the European and national levels:

•From 2030, all new buildings must be zero-emissions, and for new public buildings from 2028.

•By 2050, all new and existing buildings must be zero-emissions.

•From 2025, governments should not grant any financial incentives for the installation of boilers that consume fossil fuels such as natural gas and oil.

•Homes that do not have an energy rating of at least E cannot be put on the market from 2030.

Achieving these goals involves implementing energy efficiency measures that improve the energy performance of buildings, as well as deploying less carbon-intensive technologies having as a reference a realistic characterization of the demands that overcome the Energy Performance Gap (The difference between the predicted and real consumption of buildings).

Expected Outcomes:

The challenge covers the development of a tool for evaluating decarbonization alternatives for cooling, heating, and domestic hot water demands for different sectors.

The objective would be to generate hourly demand profiles in the most autonomous way possible with very low interaction with the potential end user of the tool. The sectors would be divided into Residential (apartment blocks) and Tertiary (offices and shopping centers) with the following subcategories:

Preferred Technology Areas

Development of tools that evaluate the different renewable thermal generation alternatives compared to existing ones based on hourly curves for the following technologies:

- Mechanical Heat pump Renewable energies

- Thermally driven Heat pump Renewable energies

- Solar thermal panels Renewable energies

- Biomass boiler Renewable energies

- Biogas boiler Renewable energies

- Thermal storage Renewable energies

- Electrochemical storage

The development of the tool should serve as an enabler to identify possible decarbonization strategies for existing installations, the main challenge in the sector.

When generating the profiles agent-based modelling approach or /and new simplified methodology to consider real consumption is presented could be of interest.