ABSTRACT
The need to fight climate change and meet the challenging environmental targets that have been set by many governments worldwide calls for a rethinking of the traditional ways in which energy systems have been planned, designed and operated. In particular, considering that the general trends in social development all point out a path towards an increasing share of the population that will live in cities worldwide, decarbonization of the energy footprint of urban areas becomes a critical point to address. In this outlook, optimal deployment and integration of locally available multi-energy resources represents a strategic area to enhance the environmental efficiency of the urban fabric. Owing to the recovery of heat that otherwise would be wasted from the thermodynamic cycle, cogeneration (or combined heat and power, CHP) is well known to be able to provide energy savings (Horlock 1997) as well as potential CO2 emission reductions (Mancarella and Chicco 2008) in given energy contexts, but has been historically limited to industrial or large scale applications. However, growing diffusion of CHP systems has been experienced in the last decade, for smaller scale applications (starting from 1 kW e 1 in the case of micro-CHP) owing to the technological development of distributed generation (DG) technologies (Borbely and Kreider 2001). However, the interest in DG has been mostly limited to electrical applications and issues (for instance, power system impacts and benefits), and the potential to investigate DG within a comprehensive energy context has often been overlooked. The decarbonization of energy sectors other than electricity, and in particular the heating and cooling sectors (depending on the country), arguably represents an even bigger challenge.
