PhD Thesis - Energy Systems Research Unit - University of Strathclyde

micro-trigeneration system. Conversely, increasing the useful thermal demand byconnecting the plant system to a larger building leads to an improvement in thesystem’s energetic, environmental and economic performance.In terms of improving the electrical efficiency of appliances, although the thermalperformance in this case is unaffected by the change in electrical demand, reducingthe overall electrical demand of the building, thus including the net electrical importsresults in an increase in the primary energy and emission savings. Converselyreducing the electrical demand, results in a decrease in the economic performance ofthe system.On this micro-scale changes in plant configuration are primarily effective inchanging the energetic and environmental performance of a system and are not soeffective in improving the systems’ economic performance, mainly because the costof the modifications is small compared to the cost individual costs of the CHP unitand the absorption chiller. The comparative energetic and environmental results ofthe systems are heavily dependent on the alternate separate generation performance.236