LOCAL – Open source planning tool for climate-neutral neighborhoods
Client Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz (BMWK)
Duration November 2023 – October 2026
Background
The building sector is expected to be climate neutral by 2045, which will require a profound transformation of the heating systems, which are responsible for the majority of energy consumption in buildings. This process will require significant changes to energy infrastructures for the provision, transport and storage of electricity and heat. In particular, the use of geothermal heat sources or inner-city low-enthalpy heat sources as new heat sources to be developed in combination with heat pumps represents a sustainable solution for households. The LOCAL joint project is investigating how a suitable energy infrastructure for electricity and heat supply systems can be developed at district level, taking into account geothermal heat sources and inner-city waste heat sources can be identified and planned. In the project, the heating and cooling requirements, geothermal potential and waste heat potential are to be determined with high spatial and temporal resolution based on georeferenced input data and brought together in a georeferenced system and as an open source planning tool.
Goals and Results
The main objectives of the project are to identify the expansion potential of inner-city heat sources and to design a climate-neutral heat supply at district level. The focus is on the development of an open source planning tool that offers a user-friendly and simple workflow to identify regional potential and plan heat supply systems in an integrated manner. The tool is intended to support users in the preliminary planning and creation of energetic district planning and municipal heat planning. On the one hand, the IREES would like to use the project to expand the methods and models for heat demand simulation in the building sector to include high-time-resolution thermal modeling of the building envelope and to standardize the potential assessment for waste heat sources. On the other hand, the planning tool developed is intended to provide municipal actors with a simple assessment of the potential for cold heating networks, adapted to regional conditions.
Tasks of IREES
At IREES, the Invert/EE-Lab model family for techno-economic building simulation is being expanded to include a thermal-dynamic building model with high temporal resolution. The existing library of reference buildings is assigned a library of typical heating and cooling demand profiles using the expanded model based on building physics parameters and local temperature and irradiation data. The reference buildings that match the local application can be selected from this library using input parameters. To systematically determine waste heat potential with energy quantities and temperature levels, a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches is chosen. The top-down approach is the identification and characterization of larger waste heat locations, which result from the reporting data from the 11th Federal Immission Control Ordinance (BImSchV) or from European registers (e.g. EPRTR) through participation in the EU ETS. In the bottom-up approach, smaller waste heat sources are characterized using company registers and industry-specific waste heat factors. Similar to other studies, the investigation only focuses on waste heat sources with a temperature of 35°C or more.
