| Popis: |
Summary: Air-to-water heat pumps come with diverse design options whose cost and performance are correlated, giving rise to a crucial question: should manufacturers aim at designing higher-performance yet higher-cost heat pumps, reducing the wider energy infrastructure cost but increasing the upfront cost to end users, or more affordable yet lower-performance alternatives? Comprehensive heat pump performance and cost models are integrated within a whole UK energy system framework to capture how different heat pump designs influence the decarbonization pathway. We find that an uptake of higher-performance heat pumps leads to a reduced national electricity generation capacity. However, there is an optimal design that minimizes the total system transition cost, indicating a point of diminishing returns, beyond which, instead of investing in even higher heat pump performance, it is more cost effective to invest in centralized energy generation and storage. Insights are valuable for locations with low heat pump adoption and high electricity-to-gas price ratios. Science for society: Reducing the carbon footprint associated with domestic heating remains a challenge in many economies. Whole-energy system models are used to identify national decarbonization pathways, but many of them share a limitation: the cost and performance of competing technologies, especially with respect to heating, are represented by single efficiency and cost values or simplified models. In this work, detailed models that capture the cost and performance characteristics of heat pumps for different designs are integrated within a whole-energy system model. This integration extends the capabilities of the system model: besides optimizing network infrastructures, it also provides information on the optimal technology designs required to meet the system-wide objectives. Our findings reveal that there is an optimal heat pump design that minimizes the system transition cost. Further performance improvements increase overall costs, favoring investment in centralized energy generation and storage. |
