Energy Engineering Trainee Johannes Bracke recently published an excerpt of his Master’s thesis for his degree in Energy Engineering at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. Johannes’ article is now available to read in the German journal Zeitschrift für Energiewirtschaft.
Many German consumers currently follow the idea of energy self-sufficiency and try to contribute to meet their energy needs in order to become independent and self-sufficient from the central power supply system. In order to achieve load-oriented energy self-sufficiency, the provision of energy must cover the full energy demand at any time. Against this background, in this paper the costs and potentials of a load-oriented energy self-sufficiency of single family homes are analyzed. Thereby it is differentiated between electricity, heat and energy self-sufficiency. The modeling is carried out with the simulation environment Polysun Designer, which allows a high temporal dynamic simulation of the annual energy demand and supply.
The results show that, within the investigated supply variations, the highest levels of energy self-sufficiency can be achieved by an energy supply system completely based on electricity using a combination of PV, heat pump and battery storage. Depending on the building standard, a maximum of 45% (existing buildings) and 71% (new buildings) of the building’s energy demand can be covered with renewable energy. The economic evaluation, however, has shown that under present conditions none of the investigated supply variants can compete with conventional energy supply (public grid connection + gas condensing boiler).
Read the German language version of Johannes’ chapter and more in the Zeitschrift für Energiewirtschaft.
