Presenter: Nina Monteiro
Supervisor(s): Dr. Thomas Adams II
Project Description: In the midst of a global conversation on how to reduce GHG emissions, Ontario's electrical grid stands out due to its extensive use of low carbon-intense processes such as nuclear and hydropower. However, due to Canada's climate, heating is a permanent need for its people. Currently, this is provided by domestic natural gas(NG)-fired boilers. The pursuit for better resource utilization is the motivation for this study, which proposes a design of combined heat and power energy management center(CHP-EMC). CHP-EMC is composed of an NG-powered internal combustion engine connected to an electrical generator(NG-CHP), a hot water tank storage, an NG boiler, and a cooling tower to keep the water temperature within acceptable bounds. EMC is connected to a water loop similar to the ones used in district heating (DH) by a heat exchanger and responds to a community's heating demand using a lumped-demand approach. The equipment size is optimized such that they fulfill the heating demand while minimizing the natural gas consumption and keeping the EMC flexible enough to endure deviations from expected demand profiles. The proposed design is compared to the status quo of heating and electricity production. The design of EMCs is set to satisfy the flexibility test, using thermal demand and the presence of NG in the electrical grid as uncertain factors. An EMC design with a high degree of flexibility can be used in a community different than the one it was originally designed for, which enables standardization of designs. The end goal of this project is to reduce GHG emissions while creating an economically viable off-the-shelf EMC, which is cheaper than a custom-designed one due to the economy of scale.