Integrating Renewable Energy into Cchp Systems: An Emergy Analysis for Sustainable Urban Development

Abstract

Emergy evaluation has been proven to be a comprehensive and meticulous method for evaluating the sustainability of a system. To address the difficulty of construction advanced Emergy-Based Framework with coupled new energy sources, emergy evaluation theory is introduced in this study. Three different structures of multi-energy systems are evaluated for their sustainable development using emergy evaluation indicators combined with traditional indicators, establishing a new comprehensive evaluation index system. The evaluation method proposed in this study overcomes the limitations of single methods and expands the scope of comprehensive evaluation, resulting in more accurate assessment results and overcoming the complexity of coupling in CCHP systems. Among the 10 evaluation indicators, the sustainability, competitiveness, and environmental load rate of the wind-solar coupled CCHP system perform the best. Compared to the photovoltaic-coupled CCHP system, it shows improvements of 5.88 times, 64.67%, and 59.5%, respectively. In comparison to the traditional CCHP system, these improvements are 3.63 times, 80.81%, and 77.16%. In the context of low-carbon development, the wind-solar coupled CCHP system demonstrates the highest level of sustainability. The PV-coupled CCHP system is ideal for urban development, while the traditional CCHP excels in emergency self-sufficiency and adaptability, fitting for city outskirts.

Keywords: emergy-Based framework, CCHP system, Sustainability, Low-carbon, urban Integration Level, environmental load