Our trainee Ruud van den Bosch has recently graduated from the Technical University Eindhoven. His two supervisors were very impressed with his work and assessed it with a 8.5. Also, a scientific publication will be written on the subject. We congratulate Ruud with this success!

In his research, Ruud has developed a model to link renovation scenarios to different sizes of the Ecovat. His model is very useful to determine what type of building renovation combined with the Ecovat which yields the optimum economic situation.

The model

The model is developed for an apartment building ‘portiek’ from the building period 1965 and older. For the renovation scenarios, two criteria are determined that are important for the system model namely, the yearly heat demand and the heating temperature. From this, four renovation scenarios are determined, namely ‘poor’, ‘reasonable’, ‘good’ and ‘excellent’. Furthermore, for each renovation scenario two setups are determined with two different vessel sizes. Thus eight setups are determined that are run by the system model. For each of the eight setups the optimal installation capacity for each device is determined and eight Total Cost of Ownerships (TCO) are calculated and compared.

Results

Renovation scenario ‘poor’ with an Ecovat vessel size M is the most economically favourable scenario. No improvements are made to decrease the energy consumption for space heating and minimum changes are needed to the building. Just plug and play. In this scenario the housing corporation is less bothered with the implications on their apartments.

However, this scenario is also less robust than other setups and has a higher chance of an energy shortage. Although little or no renovation resulted in the lowest TCO, these low cost renovation scenarios are also considered to have a higher chance of failing to deliver the demanded heat. These low cost renovation scenarios have high temperature heating and therefore the vessel can store less useable heat than when the same vessel is connected to low temperature heating. As a result the vessel can deplete in a very short time period.

Added value

The value proposition of the Ecovat system is to provide a reliable and affordable energy supply system for a very long time, i.e. 25 to 50 years. Even though Ecovat combined with ‘badly’ performing apartments result in the the most economically favourable situation , there should be a high emphasis on the robustness of the system. This robustness would make the system more reliable and future proof.

In addition, the improvement of the energy performance of the apartments is often not the only motive to renovate apartments. Other aspects such as the comfort level, safety and aesthetics can be very important drivers for a housing corporation to renovate apartments.

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Source: Modelling the effects of different renovation scenarios of apartments on the configuration of the Ecovat energy storage system. Finding the optimal economic combination of the Ecovat system and renovation. – R.T.M. (Ruud) van den Bosch