Decarbonization in district heating sector: strategies to reduce environmental impact with cost-effective solutions

The effect of climate changes resulting from human activities are becoming more frequent and more impactful, therefore the energy transition consisting in moving from non-renewables to renewable energy sources has to be undertaken as quickly as possible. What is limiting this shift is the economical aspect, since nowadays, in much part of the world is still more economically convenient to produce energy with fossil fuels. The aim of this thesis is to study if it is possible to find solution to reduce the environmental impact, while taking into account economic aspect, taking as a case study a district heating network. First chapters of the thesis are focused on international climate agreements and keywords related to energy transition, later system configuration is analysed, by focusing on energy demand, machinery typology of the plant and amount of costs and CO2 emissions released associated with them. Eventually, using XEMS13,an energy management tool that optimizes energy generation in hybrid power plants, and Gurobi, a mathematical optimization solver, several simulations will be computed, both with an economic optimization, which aims to reduce operating costs of the plant, and an environmental optimization, whose goal is to decrease CO2 emission released, in order to compare results firstly of the standard configuration and subsequently of new ones, which will be computed taking into consideration White Certificates and biomethane.