Green and Flexible District Heating/Cooling

This project will lay the foundation for a future bottom-up energy system based on renewables, communities (from building-level up to cities and beyond), and flexibility providing better user motivation/engagement, stability, and transition to sustainability in Turkey to meet the climate commitments and improve economic competitiveness by employing the Danish experience on efficient heating technologies. The project will also develop a technical framework for optimal planning and operation of thermal energy devices and processes in small to large-scale energy communities supporting distributed heating/cooling generation, storage, conversion, and flexibility with respect to the technical constraints, regulations and policies. Within this project, heat-electricity nexus (such as converting excess electric power to heat), particularly when the electric balancing requirements become more stringent in the presence of variable renewables, will be studied.

The long-term vision of the project is to enable a bottom-up approach for district heating/cooling based on green and renewable energy sources, energy communities, and energy flexibility. The main objectives of this project are:
- To develop a technical framework for integration and operation management of thermal energy sources, devices and controllable loads in small- to large-scale energy communities.
- To develop viable and validated business models for energy communities that ensure value capture and sustainability for all stakeholders in the resulting network-based business models.
- To develop data and computing techniques for flexible energy in energy communities, supporting and optimizing energy storage and conversion, and social and financial aspects.
- To develop integrated guidelines and design recommendations that work in real energy communities and to combine practice theory with empirical studies.
- To validate both integrated solutions and individual contributions through lab experiments and real-world cases.