Gas-free alternatives for existing buildings with the use of heat pumps and thermal storage – a case study

Distributed energy systems are gaining attraction within buildings and neighborhoods around the world along with energy transition. Within Europe and specifically in the Netherlands, the alteration to a gas-free greener energy infrastructure necessitates intense modifications of existing energy systems inside and outside buildings. On a positive point, the energy transition is happening when most of the major existing infrastructural gas networks are reaching the end of their lifetime. Therefore, this should be seen as an opportunity to modify the existing energy systems in an optimal manner. But, these modifications should be carried out with a clear estimation and understanding about the future changes in demands and urban structures. Therefore, it is a prerequisite to analyzing different infrastructure development scenarios for a particular neighborhood with uncertainties before planning major infrastructural changes.
The main energy consumption aspects of buildings are classified into heating, cooling and electricity, where currently heating needs a significant amount of fossil fuels. To reduce this fossil fuel utilization, heat pumps could provide one viable energy transition option. The associated lower CO2 emissions make heat pumps an attractive option which could play a promising role at the level of individual households, buildings, and neighborhoods. As part of a broader research on analyzing long-term infrastructure development scenarios, this paper provides one possible transition option with heat pumps and sensible water-based thermal storage system applied to an existing building in order to completely discontinue the gas consumption. The knowledge provided by current literature on the progress and uncertainty assessment of gas-free infrastructural developments is relatively low. This is because the actual cases where gas consumption is completely discontinued is relatively hard to discover. In the Netherlands, currently, 90% of the households are connected to the gas grid. An enormous effort is needed from all the decision maker parties (Policymakers, consultants, house owner) to make real such a gas-free transition. Different decision makers expect dissimilar benefits. Getting all the parties to be on the same understanding is quite a challenge.
In this notion, this paper analyzes a transition scenario using heat pumps and sensible water-based thermal storage system applied to an office building in the Netherlands. The case study compares the transition scenario with the current situation. An uncertainty assessment has been done in order to recognize the deviation of the results with different uncertain parameters. The uncertainty of the transition scenario is evaluated with three different parameters categorized under technical, economic and environmental.