Integrated Community Energy and Harvesting Systems (ICE-Harvest)

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Integrated Community Energy and Harvesting System (ICE-Harvest) is a cooperative research project that provides an innovative mechanism for community based integration of thermal and electrical energy use and production that significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). The problem is that traditional natural gas power plants produce "waste" heat; up to 60-70% of the energy in the fuel is "lost" or "wasted" due to the distance between heat generation and thermal demand. The proposed ICE-Harvest system will instead integrate electricity and heat production at the community level, so that communities will have access to this heat produced by natural gas power plants, decreasing the amount of extra natural gas required to be burned in our homes for heat. As the demand for heat in Ontario is so large (producing approximately 4 times the CO2 emissions of electricity), there is a great opportunity to significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption, thus potentially reducing our carbon footprint by 5.6 million tonnes of CO2 per year. The ICE-Harvest system generates electricity at a small-scale (250 kWe-2 MWe) near intensified, mixed-used areas in order to meet local peak demands (which change throughout the day, season, and year) while harvesting a significant portion of the "waste" thermal energy to supply local micro-thermal networks. ICE-Harvest is different and more appropriate for Ontario and other cold regions that need to prioritize heat management, and thus has the capability to better manage our energy needs while simultaneously reducing fossil fuel consumption. It does this through a novel combination of demand management technologies - heat pumps and absorption chillers to manage the dynamic demand for both electrical and thermal energy with both short-term and seasonal thermal storage, such as geothermal and phase change approaches. The research proposed herein will create unique design tools that will enable us to plan energy system integration for potential sites. The tools will be validated and demonstrated using the already funded McMaster ICE-Harvest Research System; a facility that is unique not only in Canada but globally.