Unplausible evolution of urban central heat balance

[cpschau]

The urban central heat balance is currently containing some unplausible elements:

• High investments in gas boilers until 2030 (likely to be fixed after solving Validation of European CHP capacities #74)
• Declining shares of air-sourced heat pumps
• Too much waste heat from Electrolysis and Fischer-Tropsch
• Remaining importance of CHP plants
  

[lindnemi]

Waste heat share seems to be down to a reasonable number now

[lindnemi]

latest 3H run (Balanced scenario)

[lindnemi]

latest 3H run (Balanced scenario)

[amos-schledorn]

I've started looking into this in a little more detail:

• Importance of CHP units seems to be mainly waste-fired CHP generation with CC.
• Resistive heaters seem to only run when heat pumps run at fill capacity (i.e. no artificial curtailment).
• So, the large share of resistive heating might come down to much lower investment costs compared to heat pumps (63 EUR/kWh vs. 906 EUR/kWh) - this is in line with the DEA techn. catalogue. Merging Approximate district heating COPs via Jensen et al. 2018 pypsa-eur#1175 might increase heat pump COPs and shift this balance towards them.

[lindnemi]

Latest 3H run (Focus Electricity scenario)

[lindnemi]

Much higher share of heat pumps, still a relatively large share of e-boilers and CHPs. Are we satisfied with these results?

[cpschau]

I am still confused about the large amounts of heat stored in hot water storage systems that are not utilized on the supply side. Why doesn't the model use heat vents for curtailing excess heat?

[amos-schledorn]

The unused stored heat seems odd to me, too. As does the declining power-to-heat utilisation (of installed capacity) in favour of CHP generation in 2040. I guess this might come down to biomass CCS, @lindnemi ?

[lindnemi]

[amos-schledorn]

• unused heat storage is actually losses. This is because water tanks are actually PTES, which have higher standing losses. I've checked for two examples and standing losses match the "unused heat".
  Issue submitted to technology-data repo: Central water tank storage uses PTES data technology-data#143
• decreasing heat pump utilisation in favour of CHP generation is waste CHP-CC in particular (see table below). I'm guessing that the model does this for CO2 sequestration.

[lindnemi]