Exergy costing for energy saving in combined heating and cooling applications

The aim of this study is to provide a price model that motivates energy saving for a combined district heating and cooling system. A novel analysis using two thermoeconomic methods for apportioning the costs to heating and cooling provided simultaneously by an ammonia heat pump is demonstrated. In the first method, referred to as energy costing, a conventional thermoeconomic analysis is used. Here the ammonia heat pump is subject to a thermodynamic analysis with mass and energy balance equations. In the second method referred to as exergy costing, an exergy based economic analysis is used, where exergy balance equations are used in conjunction with mass and energy balance equations. In both costing methods the thermodynamic analysis is followed by an economic analysis which includes investment and operating costs. For both methods the unit costs of heating and cooling are found and compared. The analysis shows that the two methods yield significantly different results. Rather surprisingly, it is demonstrated that the exergy costing method results in about three times higher unit cost for heating than for cooling as opposed to equal unit costs when using the energy method. Further the exergy-based cost for heating changes considerably with the heating temperature while that of cooling is much less affected.