Economic and Ecologic Evaluation of Low Temperature Waste Heat Integration Into Existing District Heating

The integration of waste heat into district heating offers the potential to decrease the environmental impact of the district heating's energy supply. A significant amount of waste heat is available at low temperatures, compared to existing district heating networks. In this paper, we generate a simulation model of a district heating network from a database and evaluate the integration of waste heat compared to the original design. Our simulation demonstrates the feasibility of integrating low temperature waste heat into an existing network. The waste heat utilization can decrease the primary energy consumption and CO2 emissions for the respective buildings. These results can be improved further by optimizing the low-temperature network connection of each building.