Techno-economic analysis of district cooling system: A case study

The district cooling system has the advantage of cooling load diversification (with thermal energy storage). This study presents a techno-economic analysis of the district cooling system for an educational institute located in hot and dry climatic conditions. The institute is having diverse cooling load patterns throughout the year with cumulative demand of around 30,000 TRh of cooling load. A systematic approach for the design of the district cooling system and selection of the thermal energy storage system has been discussed in the study. A comparative study of life cycle cost analysis is carried out for the individual air conditioning systems and the district cooling. The analysis of the case study shows that the chiller capacity reduces by 59.7% using a district cooling system with partial thermal energy storage. Financial analysis shows that 0.34 million USD can be saved, and an environmental study shows a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions using a district cooling system in comparison with the existing individual cooling system.