WP01: Thermal Energy System Modelling at the Mesoscale

• System-level model of thermal energy service provision
• Explore decarbonization pathways with different technical, economic, policy impacts
• Quantify the value of both renewable heating and cooling as well as of negative CO2 emissions

WP02: Understanding legal and socio-economic integration of clean heat and cooling solutions

• Understand the actor ecosystem and value network in local heating/cooling systems and the socio-technical system
• Identify the perceived drivers and barriers for implementation under different structural and socio-economic contexts
• Analysis of legal requirements
• Proposals on more efficient procedures how to increase acceptance

WP03: Technologies, design, and operation of thermal grids for future energy planning

• Define representative cases for thermal networks in Switzerland
• Develop technical solutions for storages and renewables in future thermal grids
• Develop new control algorithms for future thermal grids to form a base for energy planning

WP04: Energy demand profiles of industry and the potential for renewables integration and negative emissions

• Understand and obtain energy demand profiles at company and sector level
• Gain a solid understanding of how to exploit NETs potential in industry
• Quantify opportunities for implementing energy efficiency measures, integrating renewables, implementing fuel substitution, exploiting NETs potential, and utilizing excess heat

WP05: Combination of renewables, heat transformation and storage for medium and high temperature heating as well as cooling

• Develop solutions for heat supply at medium 80 to 200 °C and high temperature and cooling
• Showcase systems including solutions for policy, legal aspects, business models,…
• Optimal matching with respect to spatial and temporal demand
• Develop tool to identify optimal combination of renewables, storage & heat transformation

WP06: Case Study City of Zurich

• Apply, test, validate tools and results from other WP
• Integrate findings in real environment of a city, interaction with the projects of the city
• Gain insights into the barriers and success factors
• Learnings for other cities, scaling up/multiply results
• Feedback to other WP, backward and forward

WP07: Case studies Romandie: strategies and potentials of temperature reduction on existing district heating networks

• Temperature reduction in existing DH substations
• Impact of different temperature lowering strategies at the level of DH networks
• Interaction between temperature reduction strategies and other energy policy measures
• Comparison of different measures and governance arrangements for the implementation of temperature reduction strategies

WP08: Scenario and modelling, pathways, tool development, policy recommendations

• Further driving implementation of findings related to policy making
• Increase the potential impact by developing end-user focused tools that can support decisions makers

WP09: Legal and socio-economic integration of proposed solutions

• Assess the legal and socio-economic consequences they may pose
• Reduce legal and socio-economic barriers for a timely implementation of the proposed heating/cooling technology combinations
• Propose measures and procedures to realize the implementation of emerging technologies

WP10: A multi-criteria assessment suite to support decision making of renewables integration in industry

• Process integration based screening methods for renewables integration
• Techno-economic solutions assessment
• Business model development
• Multi-criteria decision analysis

WP11: Lab-scale thermal-grid indifferent testing of a prototype for heating and cooling

• Development and testing of grid-independent energy system prototype
• Digitalization and Guidelines
• Socio-economic impact and guidelines to market

WP12: Generation of negative CO₂ emissions

• Negative emissions, i.e. the extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere, are needed to compensate emissions from sectors that are difficult to tackle (e.g. agriculture)
• WP12 studies the various options in the context of concrete case studies with customers and suppliers
• Based on this assessment, a P&D project is defined for the second half of DeCarbCH