Techno-economic analysis of electrification of small-scale district heat network: comparison of linear programming and non-linear rule-based method

Abstract Electrification of heating serves as a sector-coupling method, enabling more variable renewable electricity generation in the energy system by replacing combustion-based heating. However, the detailed implementation, dimensioning and operation of heat pumps, electric boilers and thermal energy storage together with existing heat sources remains unclear due to complex system behavior and uncertain design parameters. A rule-based dispatch model was developed to enable utilization of nonlinear features in the future, such as temperature levels, or usage of lookup tables. A genetic algorithm was used to optimize the unit capacities. The performance of the method was validated by comparing results with linear programming. The rule-based method reached nearly the same levelized cost of heat, differing with 0.3% and 2.9% for the retrofit and greenfield cases, respectively.