Assessing the sustainable application of Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage

Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) can yield significant reductions in the energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of larger buildings, and the use of these systems has been rapidly growing in Europe – especially in the Netherlands, where over 3000 systems are currently active in urban areas. However, the successful management of this technology poses a range of policy challenges, due to its reliance on subsurface resources and to the possibility of thermal interactions across adjacent systems. In particular, recent research suggests that ATES planning policies should acknowledge a potential trade-off between the total energy or GHG savings which can be obtained by ATES systems within a given area, and the economic returns realized by individual system operators. To better understand this compromise, this paper follows a simplified version of the multi-objective robust decision making framework (Kasprzyk et al., 2013), using an idealized agent-based model of ATES adoption and operation coupled with a geohydrological subsurface model. This simulation approach was used to investigate suitable options for the spatial planning of ATES systems, by exploring the behaviour of the coupled system under a set of sociotechnical and geohydrological uncertainties. A multiobjective evolutionary optimization algorithm was then applied to search for ATES well layout parameters which perform well in relation to the assessment criteria. The optimization identified a set of planning parameters which describe a Pareto-efficient trade-off between the individual and collective performance of ATES systems under uncertainty.