Heating and cooling demand mapping and the utilization of district heating and cooling in energy planning: Case study for the city of Osijek

Highly efficient cogeneration and district heating and cooling systems have a significant potential for primary energy savings which are still highly underutilized in the EU. They also represent a very important factor when it comes to the planning of future energy systems because of their potential to increase the flexibility of the overall system and therefore enable a higher level of the utilization of intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and PV. The European Commission recognized the aforementioned advantages, which is made obvious by the Energy Efficiency Directive which clearly states that every member state has to conduct a detailed analysis for the utilization of highly efficient cogeneration and district heating and cooling systems. In order to properly plan such systems, comprehensive mapping of the heating and cooling needs as well as the potential to use different heat sources like geothermal energy and waste heat has to be conducted. The goal of this work is to present and utilize a heating and cooling demand mapping methodology as well the mapping of waste heat sources available for district heating utilization on a case study for the city of Osijek in Croatia. The obtained data has been used to create scenarios for the development of Osijek’s energy system utilizing district heating and cooling and renewable energy sources. The EnergyPLAN modelling tool has been used to perform the energy system analysis created for this paper.