Effects on the Unit Commitment of a District Heating System Due to Seasonal Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage and Solar Thermal Integration

The ongoing transformation of district heating systems (DHSs) aims to reduce emissions and increase renewable energy sources. The objective of this work is to integrate solar thermal (ST) and seasonal aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) in various scenarios applied to a large DHS. Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is used to develop a comprehensive model that minimizes operating costs, including heat pumps (HPs), combined heat and power (CHP) units, electric heat boilers (EHBs), heat-only boilers (HOBs), short-term thermal energy storage (TES), and ATES. Different ATES scenarios are compared to a reference without seasonal TES (potential of 15.3 GWh of ST). An ATES system with an injection well temperature of about 55 °C has an overall efficiency of 49.8% (58.6% with additional HPs) and increases the integrable amount of ST by 178% (42.5 GWh). For the scenario with an injection well temperature of 20 °C and HPs, the efficiency is 86.6% and ST is increased by 276% (57.5 GWh). The HOB heat supply is reduced by 8.9% up to 36.6%. However, the integration of an ATES is not always economically or environmentally beneficial. There is a high dependency on the configurations, prices, or emissions allocated to electricity procurement. Further research is of interest to investigate the sensitivity of the correlations and to apply a multi-objective MILP optimization.