Development of a sizing and modeling platform for district energy systems with geothermal heat pumps

Existing tools for community or urban-scale energy system modeling and simulation are often limited in their capabilities and require expert-level proficiency to develop system models. To address this gap, we propose an integrated sizing and modeling platform for district energy systems with geothermal heat pumps. The platform uses geometric and non-geometric user inputs related to the buildings, borefield, and district energy loop, sizes the geothermal heat exchanger, generates a corresponding district energy system model, and runs an annual simulation automatically. The borefield component model on our platform was validated against EnergyPlus to ensure reliable simulation performance. This paper includes a case study demonstrating the workflow and plausibility of the simulation results using the proposed platform.