Exploring the Impact of a District Sharing Strategy on Application Capacity and Carbon Emissions for Heating and Cooling with GSHP Systems

To meet long-term climate change targets, the way that heating and cooling are generated and distributed has to be changed to achieve a supply of affordable, secure and low-carbon energy for all buildings and infrastructures. Among the possible renewable sources of energy, ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems can be an effective low-carbon solution that is compatible with district heating and cooling in urban areas. There are no location restrictions for this technology, and underground energy sources are stable for long-term use. According to a previous study, buildings in urban areas have demonstrated significant spatial heterogeneity in terms of their capacity to demand (C/D) ratio under the application of GSHP due to variations in heating demand and available space. If a spatial sharing strategy can be developed to allow the surplus geothermal capacity to be shared with neighbors, the heating and cooling demands of a greater number of buildings in an area can be satisfied, thus achieving a city with lower carbon emissions. In this study, a GSHP district system model was developed with a specific embedding sharing strategy for the application of GSHP. Two sharing strategies were proposed in this study: (i) Strategy 1 involved individual systems with borehole sharing, and (ii) Strategy 2 was a central district system. Three districts in London were selected to compare the performance of the developed models on the C/D ratio, required borehole number and carbon emissions. According to the comparison analysis, both strategies were able to enhance the GSHP application capacity and increase the savings of carbon emissions. However, the improvement levels were shown to be different. A greater number of building types and a higher variety in building types with larger differentiation in heating and cooling demands can contribute to a better district sharing performance. In addition, it was found that these two sharing strategies were applicable to different kinds of districts.