The heating and cooling of buildings can give crucial contribution to the EU decarbonization targets. In this work, Life Cycle Assessment is used to evaluate the environmental sustainability of heating and cooling systems based on renewables and coupled with districtheating, located in Tuscany, Italy. The unit of analysis is a residential neighbourhood of 1000 inhabitants equivalent (250 apartments) served by district heating supplied by a geothermal heat pump system or by a biomass based heating system, and benchmarked with two fossil fuel systems: a centrally produced energy system based on natural gas and a more conventional system with single apartments boilers and inverter heat pumps. The cradle to grave analysis shows significant global GHGs emission savings, about 35% for the biomass system and about 20% for the GHP system, which increase up to 46% and 34%, respectively, with respect to the diffused system. The analysis also evaluates other impact categories and the contribution of the single stages, which are evaluated to suggest improvement opportunities, in an ecodesign approach.
The environmental sustainability of innovative systems in heat production from renewables in Tuscany, Italy
BARTOLOZZI, Irene;RIZZI, Francesco;FREY, Marco
2015-01-01
Abstract
The heating and cooling of buildings can give crucial contribution to the EU decarbonization targets. In this work, Life Cycle Assessment is used to evaluate the environmental sustainability of heating and cooling systems based on renewables and coupled with districtheating, located in Tuscany, Italy. The unit of analysis is a residential neighbourhood of 1000 inhabitants equivalent (250 apartments) served by district heating supplied by a geothermal heat pump system or by a biomass based heating system, and benchmarked with two fossil fuel systems: a centrally produced energy system based on natural gas and a more conventional system with single apartments boilers and inverter heat pumps. The cradle to grave analysis shows significant global GHGs emission savings, about 35% for the biomass system and about 20% for the GHP system, which increase up to 46% and 34%, respectively, with respect to the diffused system. The analysis also evaluates other impact categories and the contribution of the single stages, which are evaluated to suggest improvement opportunities, in an ecodesign approach.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
