RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEM FOR RESIDENTIAL BUILDING HEATING AND ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION

Project Information

RESHeat

Grant agreement ID: 956255

DOI

10.3030/956255

Project closed

EC signature date 4 September 2020

Start date 1 December 2020

End date 31 May 2025

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Secure, clean and efficient energy

Total cost

€ 2 865 250,00

EU contribution

€ 2 404 937,50

Coordinated by

POLITECHNIKA KRAKOWSKA
Poland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - RESHeat (RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEM FOR RESIDENTIAL BUILDING HEATING AND ELECTRICITY PRODUCTION)

Reporting period: 2023-08-01 to 2025-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

What is the problem/issue being addressed ?

RESHeat is an energy trigeneration system, i.e. it uses renewable energy to produce electricity, heat and cold for the needs of residential and public buildings.

The basic features of the proposed solution are: the use of solar energy as the main source of renewable energy; heat and electricity generation using PVT (PhotoVoltaic Thermal) modules of the new design; the use of PVT modules and PTC (Parabolic Trough Collector) equipped with sun-tracking system, increasing the solar energy yield; seasonal underground thermal energy storage; utilizing low-temperature heat from PVT modules for ground thermal regeneration; hutilizing heat pump for space heating and cooling.

Why is it important for society ?

More than half of the annual energy consumption in households is related to space heating and air conditioning. In the European Union, space and domestic hot water heating accounts for 79% of all energy consumed by consumers. Moreover, about 75% of the energy used for these purposes is produced from fossil fuels. Switching to renewable heating and cooling technologies such as biomass boilers and solar heating systems may help reducing fossil fuels utilization. The RESHeat project aims to create an innovative, zero-emission and autonomous energy system based only on Renewable Energy Sources (RES) solutions. The system’s innovations include integrated, cooled solar panels and solar collectors equipped with sun-tracking systems, as well as advanced underground energy storage systems. The aim of the project is to achieve a high efficiency ratio of the heat pump in the long term, which will guarantee efficient underground energy storage, while reducing the amount of energy consumed by the heat pump compressor. In addition, the solution will allow the storage of heat from various sources, including low-temperature waste heat sources.

What are the overall objectives ?

a) Development and application of heating and domestic hot water (DHW) preparation system to cover at least 70% of the total yearly energy demand of a building from RES,
b) Demonstration of the real performance (including economic performance) of innovative renewable and energy-efficient solutions for heating, cooling and DHW preparation in multi-apartment residential buildings and to provide information on the overall system performance to the end-user,
c) Demonstration of system scalability for different types of multi-apartment residential buildings,
d) System technology movement from TRL 7 to TRL 8,
e) Elaboration of the competitiveness in the building value chain and its position in growth markets,
f) Estimation of technical and economic parameters of the system (energy production, annual efficiency, costs, and energy benefit calculations, economic analysis including the worst-case scenario, the return of investment).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the two first reporting periods (PR1 and PR2) the Working Packages WP1-WP3 has been completed. Also in WP4 the RESHeat Consortium was able to complete two demosites in Cracow and Limanowa (Poland). While the start-up of the RESHeat system in Palombara Sabrina is planed on 2nd November of 2023 year. Unfortunately, In Januray 2023 passed away our Dissemination and Exploitation Manager, prof. Jiri Jaromir Klemes, who contributed significantly to project dissemination. From the beginning of the project 19 papers and 1 book chapter were published. Also including highly ranked journals such as Applied Energy, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Energy, Energy & Buildings. During the second reporting period, the RESHeat project results were presented nearly 20 times at various conferences such as (PRES, SPLITECh, SDWEWS among others).
In WP1 the preeliminary design documentations of three demosites (with 9, 13 and 24 apartments) were delivered. In WP2 the transient simulations using TRNSYS software were performed to study the RESHeat solution perfromance for Cracow, Limanowa and Palombara Sabrina. The simulations shown that for demosites in Poland, the value of yearly averaged heat pump COP is expected to be higher than 4. While for Palombara demosite it can exceed the value of 5. For demosites in Poland it is expected the full thermal energy (heating and domestic hot water preparation) coverage from Renewables. Actualy, the Cosortium started measurement campaign for Limanowa and Cracow demosites. For Limanowa demosite, the actual heat pump COP values are higher than 4.5 for Cracow the average value of COP in October is 3.2. However, the Consortium is working on better energy management in this demo site, to achieve COP value over 4.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The RESHeat project proposes a breakthrough solution to regenerate the ground heating capacity by using waste-heat from PVT panels and waste heat from sun-tracked solar collectors in time when the output temperature is less than 40oC and cannot be used for domestic water heating. Actually, the RESHeat system is installed in CZAMARA headquarters and yearly averaged COP of heat pump increased from 2 to 5.5. This means that more than 65% of electrical energy to power heat pump compressor is saved with the minimum increase in investment costs. Hence, the RESHeat project can be a milestone for the broader implementation of water to water heat pump based heating systems and the future of EU energy efficiency in buildings.

Development of highly efficient ground regeneration technique due to the heat transfer from the underground storage unit to the ground and from boreholes to the ground, therefore the COP of the heat pump is not decreasing in consecutive years. This is, in fact, the most significant innovation of RESHeat solution, which leads to maintaining the constant COP over the years of heat pump operation. There are no solutions available on the market that allows for effective ground regeneration and maintaining constant COP of the heat pump, which decreases the device efficiency year by year.

RESHeat syste