Competitiveness of renewable energies for heat production in individual housing: A multicriteria assessment in a low-carbon energy market

摘要

The French energy market is highly reliant on nuclear power. Several factors pressure for a phase-out of this technology, but finding an environmentally and economically competitive substitute is not easy. Renewable sources are a candidate, and a full deployment in the residential sector could significantly reduce nuclear-based electricity production in France. In this paper, we assess multicriteria competitiveness of renewable energies for residential heat production in a French dwelling. A total of 9 solutions combining the following systems are compared: boilers (electric, biomass or gas-fired), heat pumps (air-source or ground-source) and solar panels (solar thermal or photovoltaic). Global performance is analyzed for each solution through energy, exergy, economic, exergoeconomic and environmental (5E) multi-criteria analysis considering energy efficiency, exergy efficiency, Levelized Cost Of Energy, exergy destruction cost and CO2 mitigation. Sensitivity of selected indicators is analyzed with respect to the heat load, the investment cost and the fuel cost. The ground-source heat pump and the biomass boiler are found to be the most competitive solutions. It is also found that temporal mismatch between production and consumption is the major drawback of solar-driven solutions, especially for solar thermal collectors. One of the innovations of this study is comparing various residential heat production systems through various performance criteria. The other innovation is applying the study in the French context, which has a very high share of non-carbon electricity. Results from this study can be generalized to other OECD countries in future conditions, i.e. when their shares of non-carbon electricity become very high. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.