District Energy in Cities: A Novel Methodology to Assess Emerging Markets
Abstract
One of the factors that has allowed cities to decouple GHG emissions with growth is District Energy Systems. While district energy has supplied cities for decades in Europe, it is an unknown solution in emerging markets. Rapid assessments identify areas of interest and compare results from various configurations with conventional system’s prices. When data is not being abundantly available, our methodology considers: a reverse economic feasibility estimation to size a cost effective system, on site demand measurements with IoT sensors, uncertainty assessment of the total cost of ownership, and a decision matrix to choose the most promising sector. Our methodology has been successfully applied to 12 cities in Chile and Colombia. The results show that some cities already meet the conditions that make district energy a cost effective solution, while others require further incentives to make the technology a plausible solution. Key words: district energy, heating and cooling, sustainable cities, urban energy, energy systems