Abstract
Strong synergies exist between co-generation and renewables for reducing emission of harmful gases in the transition period towards carbon neutrality. Integration of CHP with renewables and energy storage along with electrification of buildings is a pathway to create resilient and efficient solutions towards decarbonization. Optimizing the size of a CHP system to satisfy both electrical and thermal loads of a given facility while minimizing fuel consumption is a challenging problem. The thermal load consists of heating, cooling, or hot water production. Integration of renewable energy sources and energy storage presents additional design challenges. An interactive software was developed by the authors to quickly estimate the performance of different configurations of CHP and renewable energy sources and it was tested for an office complex of 4 commercial buildings found in NREL's dataset End-Use Load Profiles for the U.S. Building Stock. The software is intended to size CHP devices and calculate the Energy Utilization Factor (EUF), CO2 emissions and the rate of Entropy Production. A heat pump module and solar PV with electrical power storage were introduced for this study. The objective of this paper is to compare different configurations of renewable or low emissions technologies and design an appropriate solution for a test data set for a Typical Metrological Year (TMY). The software requires energy inputs separated by cooling load, heating load and electric demand as a time series and is used to optimize the plant size to match all the loads to the corresponding systems.
