SaFEGround - Sustainable, Flexible and Efficient Ground-source heating and cooling systems

通过2008年的气候变化法案，英国承诺减少80%的碳排放量。虽然到目前为止已经取得了巨大的进展，但数据表明，通过将电力生产转向更绿色、更环保的来源，如海上风能，已经实现了排放量的减少。显然，为了进一步减少碳排放，我们需要在其他地方寻求改进，比如建筑的供暖和制冷，这占英国最终能源消耗的25%，碳排放量的15%。SaFEGround项目旨在提供一个模板，通过部署热泵来减少与供暖和制冷相关的排放。这些都是能够从存储介质中提取热量的高效设备，例如空气源热泵的空气或地源热泵的地面，这是高效率的，因为对于系统消耗的每单位电力，通常可以获得3-4单位的热量。显然，这些比锅炉更环保，因为它们只需要电力，正如上文所述，越来越多的电力来自可再生能源和低碳能源。因此，SaFEGround将研究如何将地源热泵与土木工程结构相结合，以可持续、安全和高效的方式提供低碳供暖和制冷。为了实现这一目标，SaFEGround将结合材料科学、热泵技术、能源岩土技术、建筑能源系统建模、全系统建模和金融等方面的研究，以证明地源能源系统可以在英国未来的低碳能源结构中发挥重要作用。

Through the 2008 Climate Change act, the UK committed to reduce by 80% its carbon emissions. While great progress has been made so far, data suggests that reductions in emissions have been achieved through switching electricity production to greener, more environmentally friendly sources, such as offshore wind. Clearly, it is inevitable that, to achieve further reductions in carbon emissions, we need to look for improvements elsewhere, such as heating and cooling of buildings, which accounts for 25% of all UK final energy consumption and 15% of carbon emissions.Project SaFEGround aims to provide a template for reducing emissions associated to heating and cooling through the deployment of heat pumps. These are efficient devices capable of extracting heat from a storage medium, e.g. air for air-source heat pumps or the ground for ground-source heat pumps, and this is done with high efficiency, since for each unit of electricity consumed by the system, it is usual to get 3-4 units of heat. Clearly, these are more environmentally-friendly than boilers as they require only electricity, which, as mentioned above, is increasingly being generated from renewable and low-carbon sources. Therefore, SaFEGround will investigate how ground-source heat pumps can be coupled with civil engineering structures to deliver low-carbon heating and cooling in a sustainable, safe and efficient manner. To achieve this, SaFEGround will combine research on material science, heat pump technology, energy geotechnics, building energy systems modelling, whole-system modelling and finance, to demonstrate that ground source energy systems can play an important role in the UK's future low-carbon energy mix in a cost-effective manner.