Decentralized energy systems are thought to have great potential for supplying electricity, cooling, and heating to buildings. A decentralized system combining a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) with an absorption chiller- heater (ACH) is proposed. The CO2-emissions and costs of using different configurations of this SOFC-based system to provide an office building in Tokyo with electricity, cooling and heating are calculated by using an SOFC- model and an absorption-chiller model together with data for cooling and heating loads measured at an office building in downtown Tokyo. The results are compared with the CO2-emissions and costs of a conventional system that obtains the base electricity requirements as well as electricity for an electric chiller–heater system from the central power grid. The fully decentralized SOFC-based energy system could result in a potential CO2 reduction of over 30% at an estimated cost increase of about 70% compared to the conventional system.
Jan Van Herle, Hossein Pourrahmani, Chengzhang Xu
Jan Van Herle, Hossein Pourrahmani, Chengzhang Xu
Jan Van Herle, Jürg Alexander Schiffmann, Victoria Xu Hong He, Michele Gaffuri