Building Integrated Renewable Heat from Biomass: Facility Management, Life Cycle Costing, and Environmental Impacts

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Energy production from renewable sources not only plays a critical role in cutting carbon emissions, but also reduces dependency on fossil fuels and diversifies the energy supply mix, enhancing national and regional energy security and independence. Renewable energy also presents itself as a driver behind community development by creating decentralized energy production capacities that are in line with local needs. This in turn contributes to enhancing the resilience of energy supply infrastructure by providing access to distributed capacities and reducing the load on centralized systems. In this sense, increasing the share of renewable energy is a major component of many national and regional energy directives across the globe. However, most of such support programs focus on use of renewables for electricity generation and less attention on generation of heat from renewables. According to International Energy Agency (IEA), heating is associated with about half of the final energy use globally, compared to about 30% and 20% shares for electricity and transport. This clearly highlights the importance and impact of increasing the share of renewable energy sources for heat generation. In the particular case of non-domestic buildings, according to IEA, about half of the energy consumption belongs to space heating and hot water supply. In Canada, the integration of biomass boilers to promote a transition to renewable heat at the building scale is emerging. Given the lack of historical data and limited literature, we propose a five year research program in modelling and analysis of the capital, operational and maintenance characteristics, life-cycle costs, and environmental impacts of building-integrated biomass boilers. In the next five years, the proposed research program aims at (1) developing a life- cycle costing model accounting for capital, operational and maintenance costs over the service life of biomass boilers in non-domestic buildings; (2) constructing a life-cycle assessment framework to analyze the environmental consequences of biomass boilers including the supply chain impacts comprising emissions, pollutions, and waste generation; and (3) identifying the optimal strategies for adoption and diffusion of biomass boilers including the decisions on the sources of biomass (suppliers and fuels), technology choices, operation and maintenance scheduling, and the space planning for generation and storage capacities. The main objective of the proposed research program is to train several PhD and MSc students in Building-Integrated Renewable Heating Systems that will work under the umbrella of the Sustainable Energy and Infrastructure Systems Engineering (SEISE) laboratory at Concordia University.