Future Residential Energy System Design

The objective of greenhouse gas-neutral economies and associated advancements in low-carbon technologies lead to a transformation of the way electricity and heat are supplied and consumed. Across the residential sector, rising energy procurement costs alongside decreasing capital costs for renewable energy technologies have driven recent trends toward individual and independent energy supply systems. Further, the electrification of mobility and heating will fundamentally change the structure of electricity demand. A comprehensive understanding of the underlying drivers that shape residential energy demand and supply is essential for designing future energy systems. Models representing fundamental connections that shape energy supply and demand and extrapolate techno-economic framework conditions are needed to predict future dissemina-tion and impacts of building energy systems.
In this thesis, neural network-based approaches from the field of natural language processing are introduced to the field of behavioral modeling. The proposed methodology enables the genera-tion of synthetic activity and mobility schedules of household occupants, which form the basis for a consistent simulation of residential electricity, heat, and mobility demand. ... mehrBased on a detailed understanding of residential energy demand, a bottom-up framework for determining the cost-minimal design and operation of residential energy systems is presented for analyzing buildings under diverse techno-economic framework conditions. Finally, a building owner's microeconomic perspective is expanded by a central planner's macroeconomic perspective to comprehensively analyze the transformation of residential building stocks within the transfor-mation of the surrounding municipal and national energy systems. Through the detailed repre-sentation of the heterogeneity and temporal inertia of local building stocks, existing shortcom-ings of a highly aggregated building stock representation are overcome.
The bottom-up framework is applied to evaluate the potential of a self-sufficient energy supply for 41 million single-family buildings in the European building stock. Cost-minimal and self-sufficient energy systems are calculated for 4,000 representative buildings on a high-performance computing cluster. Finally, surrogate models transfer the results to the entire build-ing stock. The results show that under current techno-economic conditions, 53% of the 41 mil-lion buildings can technically supply themselves by only using local rooftop solar irradiation. If building owners would be willing to pay a premium of up to 50% compared with grid-dependent systems with electrified heat supplies, over two million buildings could leave the grid by 2050. Results for municipal building stock transformations from the perspective of a central planner for the exemplary city of Karlsruhe indicate that an increase of the retrofit rate to 2% per year and substantial electrification of the heat supply in the building sector is economically and ecologically beneficial.