Simulation Setup & Configurations

• System Configuration: In a city in the North of France, the construction of an eco-district aims at promoting the solutions for sustainable and environmental-friendly cities. Collectopia roughly covers an area of 10 ha and contains several building like single houses, office buildings and a greenhouse. Heat, cold and hot water are generated by the green house and locally distributed back up boilers. An aquifer is used as long-term thermal storage device. The heat is transferred via a 4th generation district heating network, designed to work at lower temperatures of about 45 °C.
• Use-case: In summer time, the local heat pump fulfill the cooling needs of the greenhouse. The heat energy is recovered at the condenser, injected to the low-temperature DHN and stored in the long-term storage tank. Domestic hot water (DHW) needs of the residential and tertiary buildings are covered by local heat pumps. All PV panels (on the residential and tertiary buildings) form a local distribution grid to enable collective self-supply. Small local buffer tanks are used to increase the self-consumption rate (daily cycles). In winter time, the heating demand (greenhouse, residential and tertiary buildings) is covered by the DHN and the local heat pumps. The long-term storage tank is used to increase the self-consumption rate (cycles over longer periods). Eifers’s ETEM-model for the strategic planning of Collectopia differs from the system configuration used by EDF and AIT (Fig. 4), as in the planning phase the technology and component choice was subject of the optimization. The contemplated time interval of the use-case covers seasons like summer or winter. The minimum simulation time step is in case of EIFFER’s simulation one hour, EDF updates its simulation every 72 hours and AIT every 15 minutes.