Page 143 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition
P. 143
CHAPTER
7
MCDM for sustainability ranking of
district heating systems considering
uncertainties
a
Haichao Wang , Risto Lahdelma b
a
Institute of Building Environment and Facility Engineering, School of Civil Engineering,
b
Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, People’s Republic of China Department of
Mechanical Engineering, Aalto University School of Engineering, Aalto, Finland
7.1 Introduction
A district heating (DH) system is one of the most important components of city infrastruc-
tures in cold climate areas. In China, the DH area expanded from about 250 million square
meters to more than 2600 million square meters between 1991 and 2006 (Huang, 2011). In
the past 10years, since China has been undergoing a fast urbanization, the total DH demand
has grown even faster. Combined heat and power (CHP), heat only boiler (HOB), and heat
pumps (HPs) are the most popular heat sources in China to satisfy the huge amount of heat
demand. According to Tsinghua University Building Energy Research Center (2014), coal-
fired CHP supplies approximately 48% of the district heat, followed by the coal-fired heat
only boiler that produces about 42% of district heat. Gas-fired heat only boiler takes the third
place with a contribution of nearly 8%; the share from other heating technologies including
heat pump is very small—less than 2%. In China, CHP plants are mainly coal-based and al-
most a half of the total heat is produced by coal-fired HOB. This is mainly because coal is the
primary fuel for DH due to the connatural energy structure (Lin, 2002). More and more DH
systems will be built in the near future, and the DH area will be gradually expanded from
north China to south China, specifically from the extremely cold area and cold area to the
hot summer and cold winter area.
Different DH technologies have different characteristics from the economics, environment,
and energy (3E) points of view, which can reflect the sustainabilities of them; therefore
Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Decision-Making 139 Copyright # 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818355-7.00007-5
