Cooling supply costs of a university campus

Simon Schüppler, Paul Fleuchaus, Antoine Duchesne and Philipp Blum

Energy, 2022, vol. 249, issue C

Abstract: Global climate change and growing research activities lead to increasing cooling demands and related supply costs at universities, while at the same time ambitious goals towards carbon neutral campuses are established. Hence, universities are facing the challenge to develop large scale future-proof cooling solutions. This also applies to the Campus North of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where the current cooling supply, consisting of decentralized rooftop compression chillers, is insufficiently monitored resulting in a lack of knowledge on supply costs and cooling needs of each facility. Hence, the objective of this study is to examine the current cooling supply and related cost by the analysis of 47 compression chillers supplying 23 buildings at the campus. To compensate for the given uncertainties of the provided input parameters, a Monte Carlo simulation is performed revealing cooling costs ranging between 5.4 and 11.4 eurocent per kWh. The overall supplied energy and installed cooling capacity amount to 70 GWh and 20 MW, respectively. Cumulative annual costs of 4.5 € million, mainly resulting from the electricity costs to power the chillers, request for a transition to a decentralized and more efficient cooling supply by integrating renewable cooling supply solutions.

Keywords: Cooling supply; Cooling supply costs; Cooling capacity; Compression chiller; Monte Carlo analysis; District cooling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544222004571
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:249:y:2022:i:c:s0360544222004571

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2022.123554

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().