Abstract
Economic and population growth is leading to increased energy demand across all sectors—buildings, transportation, and industry. Adoption of new energy consumers such as electric vehicles could further increase this growth. Sensible utilization of clean renewable energy resources is necessary to sustain this growth. Thermal needs in a building pose a significant challenge to the energy infrastructure. Potential technological solutions to address growing energy demand while simultaneously lowering the carbon footprint and enhancing the grid flexibility are presented in this study. Performance assessment of heat pumps, solar thermal collectors, nonfossil fuel-based cogeneration systems, and their hybrid configurations is reported in this study. The impact of design configuration, coefficient of performance (COP), electric grid’s primary energy efficiency on the key attributes of total carbon footprint, life cycle costs, operational energy savings, and site-specific primary energy efficiency are analyzed and discussed in detail. Heat pumps and hydrogen-fueled solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are highly effective building energy resources compared to traditional approaches; however, the carbon intensity of electrical energy and hydrogen production are keys to the overall environmental benefit.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 034501 |
| Journal | Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2021 |
Funding
This research was supported by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Building Technologies Office and used resources at the Building Technologies Research and Integration Center, a DOE-EERE User Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http:// energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
Keywords
- building
- carbon footprint
- clean energy
- cogeneration
- conservation
- efficiency
- electrical systems
- energy
- environment
- fuel cell
- heat pumps
- hybrid systems
- hydrogen
- renewable
- solar thermal