Community thermal energy storage, a cost-effective pathway for the decarbonisation of suburban cooling in Australia

Information from the abstract

Residential cooling demand in Australia is increasing due to rising temperatures, urban infill, and improved building insulation that traps internal heat. Solar photovoltaic (PV) generation combined with onsite energy storage presents a promising pathway to decarbonise cooling loads; however, the optimal configuration at a neighbourhood scale remains unclear. This study conducts a comparative assessment of three cooling strategies in a suburban Australian context: (i) individual systems, where each household operates stand-alone PV and storage; (ii) district systems, where cooling and storage are centralised; and (iii) community shared systems, where storage is centralised but households have their own cooling. Each configuration integrates individual PV generation. Energy storage is implemented either as battery storage or thermal energy storage (TES), playing a critical role in enabling load shifting, improving PV self-consumption, and reducing reliance on grid electricity by temporally decoupling cooling demand from solar generation availability. A detailed TRNSYS simulation model was developed using high-resolution meteorological, load, and tariff data for an Australian suburb. System performance was evaluated in terms of energy consumption, primary energy saving, life cycle cost, storage utilisation efficiency, grid export minimisation, PV self-consumption rate, and peak reduction. Among six configurations, the district cooling system with centralised battery achieves the highest primary energy saving (98.6%) and almost eliminates grid imports but also exhibits the highest life cycle cost (USD 1.36 million). In contrast, the community system with thermal energy storage achieved a balanced performance, delivering 86.1% primary energy saving at the lowest life cycle cost of USD 0.55 million, making it the most cost-effective solution for this suburban community. By jointly evaluating individual, district, and community cooling architectures with both battery and PCM storage under a common Australian framework, this study clarifies the techno-economic trade-offs of neighbourhood-scale PV-integrated cooling and highlights community TES as a cost-effective pathway for reducing grid electricity dependence and associated primary energy demand, thereby contributing to the transition towards net-zero energy systems at the suburban scale.

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Related topics: Integrated Energy Systems Optimization · Thermodynamic and Exergetic Analyses of Power and Cooling Systems · Smart Grid Energy Management