The main objective of this project is to study the potential of a Borehole Thermal Energy Storage (BTES), designed with the intent to store thermal energy seasonally, in helping maximise the yearly performance of an energy system in terms of electric load profile shaving and CO2 emissions.
The hypothesis is that the operating conditions of such storage, in particular its operating temperature, are a critical factor in determining its performance under defined system boundary conditions (yearly CO2 emission profile of the electricity provider, heating and cooling demand profiles, supply and return temperatures for the supply network, etc.), and the integration of solar generation technologies can significantly vary the optimal configuration of the storage. It is thus expected that a higher BTES temperature would result when energy sources with low CO2 intensities in summer are available. This in turn would lead to a more significant seasonal load shift and thus higher heat pump performance in winter and therefore lower over-all CO2 emission.
In particular, it is envisioned that a replicable design and operation optimization methodology for energy systems with a BTES is developed in this project, modelling the dynamics of the system in a numerically tractable way to enable optimization algorithms to find the best system configuration while retaining the key physical phenomena that guarantee a good prediction performance compared to currently available modelling techniques.