Environmental Approach of an Enhanced Geothermal System for Energy Efficient Building Retrofitting in a Decentralized Context

Conference paper presented in European Geothermal Congress 2022 held in Berlin, 17-21 October

Title: Environmental Approach of an Enhanced Geothermal System for Energy Efficient Building Retrofitting in a Decentralized Context

Datasets: “Building energy simulation data results” and “Acquired data from existing and/or new installed meters or from existing BEMS (pre intervention EcoSCADA monitoring data)” – Raw data is available upon request. Follow the link and fill the request form.

Language: English

Authors: Ewa Alicja Zukowska (*1), Maria Parascanu(*1), Henrikki Pieskä (*2), Jose Jorge Espi Gallart (*1), Frederic Clarens Blanco (*1), Marco Calderoni (*3), Qian Wang (*2, 4)

*1: Eurecat, Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya
*2: Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
*3: R2M Solution s.r.l

*4: Uponor AB

Abstract: The life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology for assessing environmental impacts associated with the stages of the life cycle (LC) of a product, process, or service. This paper compares the results of the entire LCA (cradle-to-grave analysis) of a hybrid heating geothermal system that includes a novel hybrid heat pump 8kW and set of heating components integrated with the novel ground source heat pump (GSHP) concept which was installed in a building located in the Aran Islands (Ireland) within the framework of the H2020 GEOFIT project against the heating system, that existed before the retrofitting. The building selected for the demonstration had in its original version a 21kW diesel boiler (Firebird model S/90) used for heating and an emission system based on 9 radiators with individual on / off control located in different rooms, as well as a coal stove in the living room.
To determine the heat energy of the building before and after the retrofitting, simulations of the heat energy were carried out with the IDA Indoor Climate and Energy 4.8 simulation software, and the SimaPro v.9.1 program was used to calculate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The results show that a new heating system (after GEOFIT) is better alternative than conventional one (before GEOFIT), mainly in terms of generating more heat with less heating energy consumption during the operation stage.
The new system can reduce annual operational emissions by more than 53% in comparison to the reference one.