Promoting the performance of district heating from waste heat recovery in China: a general solving framework based on the two-stage branch evaluation method

Abstract Recycling heat from local industrial processes is one of the suitable and strategic opportunities for district heating all over the world. However, in northern China, the majority of low-grade energy has been wasted, the main difficulties are of an institutional and commercial character. The rapid development of renewables and constant promotion of time-of-use tariff policy has provided new chances for power-to-heat implementation and thermal energy storage. In this study, a general configuration optimization framework of additional waste heat recovery and storage (WHRS) devices is proposed, which is based on the cost-benefit analysis. Due to the implicit nature of such an optimization problem, conventional economic dispatch, two-stage branch evaluation, linear programming solver, and two kinds of advanced optimization algorithms (i.e., Genetic Algorithm and Pattern Search) have been integrated systematically. Moreover, case studies and sensitivity analyses are conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed optimization model and to reveal the effects of uncertain economic parameters, respectively. The results show that the average time-consuming of Pattern Search is only 4.9% of the GA optimizations. When introducing additional WHRS devices with optimal configurations, the total operating costs decreased by 6.9% and the cost proportion of gas boiler declines remarkably from 8.6% to 2.0%.