Design and assessment of distributed energy systems for neighboring buildings

Thanks to its relatively high overall efficiency, the combined heat and power (CHP) system is recognized to be the most feasible distributed energy resource (DER) technology to cope with the continuing global warming. Although facing a bright future, there are inevitably some barriers against building the penetration of CHP systems. One of which is the unbalanced electricity and heat between the supply and demand sides. This paper aims at discussing the advantages of energy exchanging between neighboring buildings with the adoption of CHP systems. For this purpose, an optimization model has been developed for the optimization of local distributed energy system while taking system energy performance as the objective function. According to the simulation results, the energy exchanging between the buildings may increase the overall system efficiency to some extent.