Environmental and Health Impacts of Domestic Hot Water (DHW) Boilers in Urban Areas: A Case Study from Turin, NW Italy

Marco Ravina, Costanza Gamberini, Alessandro Casasso and Deborah Panepinto
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Marco Ravina: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Costanza Gamberini: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Alessandro Casasso: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy
Deborah Panepinto: Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI), Politecnico di Torino, corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 2, 1-18

Abstract: Domestic hot water heat pumps (DHW HPs) have spread fast in recent years in Europe and they now represent an interesting opportunity for implementing renewable energy sources in buildings with a centralized/district heating system, where DWH is generally produced by a gas boiler or an electric water heater. Replacing these appliances has several environmental benefits, including the removal of air pollution sources and the reduction of Green House Gasses (GHG) emissions. In this work, we present the techno-economic and environmental evaluation of implementing DHW HPs in Turin, where 66% of the DHW demand is covered by dedicated gas boilers. The impact of such boilers was assessed through numerical air dispersion modeling conducted with the software SPRAY (Aria Technologies, Paris, French). Results show that removing these sources would reduce yearly average concentrations of NOx up to 1.4 µg/m 3 , i.e., about 1% of monitored concentrations of NOx, with a benefit of 1.05 ÷ 15.15 M€/y of avoided health externalities. Replacing boilers with DHW HPs is always financially feasible with current incentives while, in their absence, it would be convenient for residential units with 3 cohabitants or more (51.22% of the total population), thanks to scale economies.

Keywords: domestic hot water; heat pump; environmental pollution; air dispersion modeling; environmental health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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