Techno-economic assessment of dual-source heat pump systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study presents a techno-economic assessment of dual-source heat pump (DSHP) systems, which integrate air- and ground-source operations. These heat pumps could mitigate the high upfront costs associated with conventional ground-source heat pump (GSHP) systems, but the feasibility of their operations in cold climates is unknown. A simulation model of the system is developed to evaluate DSHP performance across three Canadian cities—Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal. The overall system model integrates low-level models and/or data for various components from recent literature to understand and compare energy consumption of DSHPs compared to GSHPs over a 20-year lifespan. These include heat pump performance curves derived from available experimental data in literature, a semi-analytical borehole model that couples thermal interactions between the ground heat exchanger (GHE) that is connected to the heat pump and the surrounding ground, accurate for both short-term and long-term simulations of ground heat flows, and a control strategy that switches operational modes based on outdoor temperature thresholds.Three outdoor air temperature set points (0°C, -5°C, and -10°C) are analyzed—above which the heat pump switches from GSHP mode operation to air-source—to determine their impact on borehole design requirements, heating and cooling coefficients of performance (COP), energy consumption, and life-cycle costs. Simulation results reveal that lowering the temperature set point extends the duration of air-source mode operation, thereby reducing the required borehole length by up to 19-42% in the three locations compared to GSHP-only systems. However, this reduction in borehole size is accompanied by a decline in heating mode COP and an increase in long-term electricity consumption due to the lower efficiency of air-source operation.A life-cycle cost analysis is conducted over a 20-year horizon, incorporating both capital expenditures—primarily associated with drilling and GHE installation—and operating costs based on regional electricity rate structures. The analysis demonstrates that, despite higher operational expenses, the capital cost savings achieved through reduced borehole requirements lead to a significant reduction in net present value of costs, particularly in Toronto (up to 14%) compared to more modest savings in Edmonton and Montreal (approximately 5%). Such reductions suggest that DSHPs might be a feasible alternative for GSHPs where the large capital costs of GSHPs limit their adoption. The study highlights the critical trade-offs between capital cost reductions and operational performance, emphasizing the need for climate-specific optimization of DSHP systems, laying the groundwork for further experimental validation and refinement of DSHP systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".