Life Cycle Assessment and Economic Analysis of a Vapor Compression System Integrated with a Large District Cooling Plant

In most District Cooling DC setups, Vapor Compression Chillers VCC are installed to provide Chilled Water CW for charging the Thermal Energy Storage TES tank or direct CW supply to the DC network.The operation of these VCC systems accounts for the most electrical power supplied to the entire DC plant.This strengthens the need to conduct an environmental and cost implication analysis using these systems for refrigeration purposes.A gate-to-gate Life Cycle Assessment LCA and Life cycle Cost LCC methodologies are utilised in this study for these objectives.A case study of four VCC systems installed in a large DC plant in Malaysia is examined.It is observed from the inventory results that the climatic temperature conditions had a significant influence on the monthly cooling demand, energy consumed, environmental impact and cost incurred.The result reveals that fuel choice had the most significant influence on the environmental impact contribution of the use phase.The LCA result of the considered phase (use phase) shows that the carbon footprint per refrigeration is given as 0.05 kg CO2 eq/RTh, while the cost per refrigeration ton of the VCC system is estimated to be MYR 0.005/RTh. © 2023, Institute of Technology PETRONAS Sdn Bhd.