Assessment of Energetic, Economic and Environmental Performance of Ground-Coupled Heat Pumps

Matteo Rivoire, Alessandro Casasso, Bruno Piga and Rajandrea Sethi
Additional contact information
Matteo Rivoire: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Alessandro Casasso: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Bruno Piga: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Rajandrea Sethi: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 8, 1-23

Abstract: Ground-coupled heat pumps (GCHPs) have a great potential for reducing the cost and climate change impact of building heating, cooling, and domestic hot water (DHW). The high installation cost is a major barrier to their diffusion but, under certain conditions (climate, building use, alternative fuels, etc.), the investment can be profitable in the long term. We present a comprehensive modeling study on GCHPs, performed with the dynamic energy simulation software TRNSYS, reproducing the operating conditions of three building types (residential, office, and hotel), with two insulation levels of the building envelope (poor/good), with the climate conditions of six European cities. Simulation results highlight the driving variables for heating/cooling peak loads and yearly demand, which are the input to assess economic performance and environmental benefits of GCHPs. We found that, in Italy, GCHPs are able to reduce CO 2 emissions up to 216 g CO 2 /year per euro spent. However, payback times are still quite high, i.e., from 8 to 20 years. This performance can be improved by changing taxation on gas and electricity and using hybrid systems, adding a fossil-fuel boiler to cover peak heating loads, thus reducing the overall installation cost compared to full-load sized GCHP systems.

Keywords: borehole heat exchanger; geothermal heat pump; TRNSYS; thermal load; payback time; hybrid ground source heat pump; CO 2 emissions; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/8/1941/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/8/1941/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:8:p:1941-:d:160087

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().