Fossil Free Heating in Private Households for Germany and The Netherlands

Heating currently corresponds to almost half of the total global energy consumption in buildings (Francois Briens, 2023), and is being one of the main sectors affected by global warming as we are currently experiencing record breaking temperatures during the winter. At the same time the heating industry in buildings is responsible for more than 4000 mega-tons of CO2 equivalent emissions every year (IEA, 2023), and from this total around 44% correspond to residential heating (IEA, 2022). For Germany the current main sources for residential heating are natural gas (46%) and heating oil (25%), while for The Netherlands the panorama is similar with natural gas (85%), which correspond to fossil fuels. On the other hand fossil free technologies only account for less than 16% of the demand in these countries (IEA, 2023). Hence the need to look for ways to decarbonize the heating sector urgently as most of the efforts are focused on power generation (electricity), but heat tends to be left out of the focus in most cases. This study was aimed to answer a broad question on what would be the future of heating, then several approaches were studied, reviewing heat generation technologies mostly related to electrification, but also investigating on heat communities, heat as a service, storage technologies and also having a more complex system approach combining power and heat generation with heat and electricity storage based on computational simulations. The way to approach the research was divided in different steps, first a general overview of the heat industry and current situation in both countries is presented and also compared to the Swedish, then a techno economic analysis was performed using an excel model based on a 20 year cashflow (and operation of the devices), to evaluate different economical, performance and environmental key performance indicators. This was done taking specific study cases for buildings in Germany and The Netherlands (2 single-family housing and 2 multi-family housing for each country) and also based on weather data from Berlin and Amsterdam. A total of 22 innovative ideas or technologies were evaluated and in most cases the natural refrigerant heat pumps showed high potential as well as cold-climate air source heat pumps and specially the combination of heat pumps with solar power (PV and solar thermal), from this results the next step was to further analyze the systems combinations. Therefore the system approach was assessed using Polysun, a heat system simulation software based on templates to evaluate the use of different power and heat sources and devices as well as the combination with different types of storage based on specific demand parameters. From the simulations the inclusion of PV and lithium ion batteries showed promising results (mostly for the Netherlands), but it seems like a clear way to go even more considering current and future subsidies and government aids to foster the use of clean technologies. As this was intended as a high level study, then the future steps are also discussed and should be focused on the prove of concept of the results obtained here and the application in specific sites and cases with in field testing for different technologies and system combinations.