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Decentralized surplus feed-in of solar heat into a District Heating Network (DHN) is here addressed. The heat collected from solar panels located on rooftops of DHN connected buildings may either be used locally for domestic hot water and space heating or fed into the DHN. Two-way substations able to transfer heat from and into the network seem then to be required utilities. The present paper presents the specifications (60kW capacity, return-to-supply connection) and promising architectures of such two-way substation based on a previous analysis. A first-of-a-kind Modelica-based dynamic model of the substation together with the consumer and the solar field connected to it is then detailed. Two-day simulations considering real operating conditions of DHN were then performed. The results highlighted i) the good match between the periods of solar heat reinjection with the periods of low supply temperature and differential pressure and ii) the decisive benefit of the reinjection to increase the part of useful solar energy.

In recent years, Machine Learning has become one of the most used techniques when modelling relationships between different parameters. Inspired by the successful integration of Machine Learning in many other areas, it is beginning to draw attention in the district heating sector as well. The application of Machine Learning in the context of district heating has an obvious potential as a component of tomorrows heating networks.

In most cases, building service designers choose between Solar thermal (ST) and District Heating (DH) technologies for their integration in buildings. By doing so, only a fraction of the buildings within a particular district is used for ST, while at the same time energy intensity in DH networks can be reduced. In some cases, building-integrated solar thermal systems are connected to DH networks by means of dedicated pipes. In all these cases, sub-optimal situations are reached with lower fraction of renewable heat, reduced network strength and/or additional heat losses. In this paper, a consummer substation concept is proposed with reversible heat flow and net metering, which avoids local thermal storage in the solar loop. Adaptations required for multi-dwelling buildings are presented

Survey of Aberdeen City residents conducted by the James Hutton Institute for the SMARTEES project in December 2019 to January 2020 (n=838). The survey aims to understand what influences people's decisions to join a district heating network and includes data pertaining to their attitudes, behaviours and social networks. Files include the dataset in three formats: .csv, .rdata and .sav. The questionnaire, a data dictionary and background and sampling details are also included.

Ultra-Low temperature district heating introduces multiple benefits at network level, as the reduction of heat losses and the improvement of heat generation efficiency. ULTDH also facilitates the integration of low temperatures renewable energy sources and waste heat into the district heating network. Renewable heat sources as solar thermal and heat pumps can be coupled to the district heating network and the buildings through specially designed district heating substations.

Within the framework of this article the management system of WEDISTRICT – DEMO Romania is presented. The key performance indicators of energy, economics, environmental impact or social type are explained and analysed throughout the entire project. The general objective of the European project is to demonstrate the possibility of switching off from fossil fuels usage for centralized generation of thermal energy, by optimally integrating different types of renewable energy sources in the existing systems of different European countries. Throughout the project, 10 technologies will be developed, which will be integrated in 4 demonstrators. One of the demonstrators will be developed and integrated and University POLITEHNICA Bucharest.

The integration of prosumers (consumers who can both consume and produce energy) in a current district heating network (DHN) brings new challenges to the market and DHN operation, since they can change the thermal flow in the DHN and increase competition in the district heating market. In this scope, this work proposes the implementation of a coordination methodology based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) market to enable bilateral energy trades between producers, prosumers and consumers, coupled with the DHN operation. A Nordic DHN containing prosumers is used to test and validate the proposed methodology. The results point out that the coordination methodology is able to provide compromise solutions between the market negotiation and the DHN operation. An important conclusion is that the coordination methodology encourages prosumer integration in DHN, increasing market competition that may pull down the energy costs for consumers while avoiding DHN’s operating and management burdens. This work is partially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 through the EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation, within the EMB3Rs project under agreement No. 847121.

This work aims to understand the potential of an innovative technology for solar energy harvesting in a District Heating Network (DHN). The considered technology is aesthetic solar façade thermal panel. In order to guarantee the temperatures required by a 3rd generation DHN (around 75°C), a Heat Pump, using as cold source the heat from the panels, is necessary. It is worth noting that the coupling between façade panels and Heat Pump requires accurate evaluations. The optimum condition for the façade panels is to work at low temperatures (close to ambient or even below), while the Heat Pump reaches high Coefficient Of Performance (COP) when the temperature difference between hot and cold sources is minimized. In the first part of the study, a system model has been built using Matlab SIMULINK using results of tests on the panels already performed inside the H2020 ENVISION project. Different colours are considered. In the second part, a predictive mode-based strategy has been defined and tuned on the system in order to guarantee the best system performances in interaction with the DHN. This work will allow to understand whether this technology is feasible in the presented scenario and this layout can improve local energy exchange.