Improving the accuracy of heat pump feasibility assessment

This research provides techno-economic assessment of three different heat pump systems within the transition in energy markets. The assessment is carried out using a generic Microsoft EXCEL tool, which is widely applicable for cases with different scale, heat sources and output temperatures. The tool includes profitability and performance calculation for selected refrigerant conditions and components. The main objective of the tool is to calculate COP accurately from enthalpies for given demand and temperatures instead of using Carnot’s efficiency. In the tool, the price of the electricity is evaluated based on few different scenarios reflecting the development of electricity prices to comprehensively assess the long-term profitability of the selected three heat pump systems. The performance and flexibility of the ground source heat pump in the same building is evaluated using the tool within three different cases: ground source heat pump, ground source heat pump and thermal energy storage, and hybrid operation combining ground source heat pump and district heating. As a conclusion thermal energy storage along with ground source heat pump improves the flexibility of the system the most and reduce the dependency between electricity prices and system profitability. Thermal energy storage along with heat pump decreased the annual heating cost up to 28% compared to using solely heat pump.