A Cogeneration System for an Apartment Building Using Distributed Heat Storage Technology

In order to spread economically viable distributed generation systems for apartment buildings, it is essential to develop an efficient and low-cost heat supply system. We are developing a new cogeneration system (Neighboring CoGeneration system: NCG). The key concept of this system is to install a heat storage unit with a hot water supply and a room heating function at each household and to connect heat storage units by a single-loop hot water pipe. In this study, a simulator was developed to reproduce the dynamic performance of the NCG system that combined cogeneration with solar heat for 50 households, and the environmental load reduction effects of the system were evaluated on the condition that heat supply to all households was ensured. It showed that the gas engine system reduced the primary energy use by 18% in a year. Meanwhile, the SOFC system reduced the primary energy use by 29%.