ENERGY CONSERVATION ASSESSMENT OF DISTRICT HEATING AND COOLING SYSTEM BASED ON LIFE-CYCLE ENERGY

Abstract

District Heating and Cooling (DHC) has been introduced as a countermeasure against air pollution. Recently, the purposes of DHC have been diversified such as measures for energy conservation, urban disaster prevention, and global environment protection. As the construction of environment-friendly social systems is becoming one of the most important tasks of our time, DHC can be expected to play a significant role in energy conservation in the consumer sector. There have been many papers published from the aspect of energy conservation in DHC, and most of those studies are based on energy consumption during the operation. However, as DHC is an urban infrastructure and considering the difficulty of demolition, it is important to evaluate DHC based on Life-Cycle Energy (LCE), which considers overall energy consumption including every step from construction, operation, and repair to disposal. Therefore, in this study, the LCE of the DHCs in commercial districts were calculated based on the Input-Output table (I-O table), and the LCE parametric study was performed to conduct an energy conservation assessment of DHC in terms of LCE.