Systems study of absorption and compression chillers in a combined district cooling and district heating system

The demand for air-conditioning is increasing in Sweden, which has lead to establishment of district cooling networks. One important aspect when considering energy and cost efficient ways to produce cooling is how the chillers can interact with the existing district heating system. In this paper, a system study is performed on use of absorption and compression chillers for producing district cooling. The study especially accounts for the interaction between the district heating system and the district cooling system. Absorption and compression chillers are evaluated considering technical feasibility, cost and CO2 emissions. A number of scenarios are considered according to expected future changes in the energy sector. The result shows that the cost of the system and the CO2 emissions could be lowered when integrating the cooling network with the heating system. The optimal choice is a combination of cooling technologies where the absorption chillers are used for base load and compression chillers for peak load