1. Introduction
In Europe, natural gas is widely used for winter heating, and, nowadays, many greenhouse gas emissions still come from burning fossil fuels [
1]. For this reason, the European directives have obliged the European States to develop alternative renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, and geothermal, to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere [
2,
3]. Heat pumps and solar thermal systems realize the objective to reduce fossil fuels and to achieve decarbonization goals, including net zero greenhouse gas emissions at 2050 [
4]. Heat pumps are particularly helpful for winter heating in temperate and mild climates and, therefore, could be particularly effective in Italy. A general analysis of the Italian energy system is reported in [
5] and focuses on the possible energy, economic, and environmental effects of the use of individual heat pumps for winter space heating. Another aspect driving the decarbonization goals in the building sector is related to the envelope. For instance, different researchers investigated the use of glass facades [
6,
7,
8].
Concerning the heat generation system, in the literature, many papers have investigated the evaluation of the seasonal coefficient of performance (SCOP) of heat pumps, both geothermal [
9,
10,
11,
12] and air-source, also considering, in the latter case, the effect of the defrosting cycle [
13]. Regarding the integration of heat pumps with solar panels, the so-called solar-assisted heat pump systems, the most used system considers a heat pump connected to photovoltaic panels [
14,
15]. These systems suffer from a decrease in electric conversion efficiency, mainly at the latitudes of Southern Europe, when the temperature in the solar collectors rises. Moreover, in [
16], the authors demonstrate that climate changes have influenced PV energy production in the past period and will continue to cause a reduction in energy production.
In fewer papers, attention is paid to hybrid solar–geothermal heat pumps, although solar thermal panels and geothermal heat pumps have a high potential to reach the objective of the Paris Agreement [
17]. As stated by Guelpa and Verda [
18], thermal storage facilities ensure a heat reservoir for optimally tackling the dynamic characteristics of district heating systems. Ciampi et al. [
19] simulated a solar district heating system for a period of 5 years when serving a district composed of six typical single-family houses under the climatic conditions of Naples (central Italy). The analysis showed that the use of a seasonal borehole TES connected to a solar DH system allowed for a primary energy reduction of 6% and a reduction in carbon dioxide emission of more than 4%. Another work [
20] demonstrated that seasonal storage combined with a solar plant could decrease energy consumption by about 26%. An experimental study [
21] of a ground-coupled heat pump used in a 180 m
2 private residence, combined with thermal solar collectors, showed that the energy injected into the ground was 34% of the heat extracted from the ground by using a heat pump with a COP of 3.75 after 11 months of operation. In a recent work [
22], the authors investigated, by means of dynamic simulation over a 15-year period, a solar-assisted, ground-coupled heat pump system that met the domestic hot water demand of 960 students. The simulation outcomes regarding the underground heat balance were compared with a standalone heat pump. The results showed that solar energy storage in the ground could lessen the thermal imbalance caused by continuous heat extraction and correspondingly could improve the system’s performance. In addition, when the entire system was employed in regions where solar energy resources were consistent, the average temperature of the soil may increase year by year instead of decreasing as when a stand-alone heat pump is used. Thermal energy storage presents many advantages with respect to other storage systems, when compared with batteries in particular. Lund et al. [
23] criticized electricity storage because more efficient and cheaper options existed. They asserted that electricity was not the optimum solution to integrate large inflows of fluctuating renewable energy.
As already discussed, previous published papers asserted that electricity was not the optimum solution to integrate large inflows of fluctuating renewable energy. In the present work, the long-term behavior of a solar-assisted ground source heat pump was analyzed. The case study was represented by a school virtually located in Italy, in the city of Milan. In the summer periods, while there was no energy demand in the school, the solar collector gave energy to the borehole field. The novelty of the present analysis, in fact, consisted of using the solar collectors to restore the soil in order to increase the COP of the ground source heat pump or to reduce the probe’s field. Different simulations were carried out varying the number of probes and the area of the solar collectors, in order to determine the soil temperature for 15 years, comparing the seasonal performances of the heat pump.
3. Results and Discussion
Twelve different simulations were conducted, varying the number of probes and the areas of the solar collectors in order to determine the soil temperature for 15 years. Details of the simulations are reported in
Table 5.
Table 5 also reports the storage volumes of the soils considered for the simulations by Type 557a: for every simulation, a soil volume in order to neglect the boundary effects on the simulations and the soil temperature results has been assumed. The mass flow rate of the solar pump has been determined in order to obtain a flow rate of 50 L/m
2 for the installed collector.
In
Table 6, the average annual thermal energies (averaged over the 15 years of simulations conducted) and the electricity demands related to the geothermal heat pumps are reported for each simulation.
Cases A1–A4 are presented in
Table 6 (i.e., with no solar collectors), and an increase in electricity demand of 5% for case A4 (total length of ground probes of 1 km) with respect to case A1 (total length of 2.5 km) can be noticed.
It can also be noticed that in the simulations from A1 to A4 the thermal energy given to the storage was higher compared to the subsequent simulations (an average of 46.23 MWh for simulations from A1 to A4, compared to the average of 42.65 MWh for simulations from A5 to A12).
In
Table 7, the thermal energy required and injected in the borehole field are reported for each simulation, together with the thermal energy given by the solar collector (if included in the analysis) to the hot water tank during winter and the one supplied to the borehole field during the summer.
If we focus on
Table 7, we can see that the thermal energy taken from the ground is always higher than the energy given to it, as it is also in cases A9–A12 (cases considering a collector surface area of 40 m
2): the total energy unbalanced to the ground ranges between −33.99 MWh for case A1 to −2.15 MWh in case A12.
If we consider the data related to the thermal energy supplied by the solar collectors for the simulation groups with the same areas, namely, A5–A8 (30 m2) and A9–A12 (40 m2), we observe that there is a comparable increase in the thermal energy supplied by the collectors during the summer (31.7%) despite an increase in the collection area of approximately 33.3%. However, during the heating season, the increase is more modest (going from an average of 3.72 MWh in cases A5–A8 to a mean value of 4.63 in cases A9–A12, resulting in a percentage increase of 24.5%). The slight increase in solar collector production during winter by increasing the area does not appear to have significant effects on the thermal energy extracted from geothermal probes during winter, considering the two simulation groups (A5–A8 averaging 31.48 MWh and A9–A12 averaging 30.75 MWh). However, when considering the annual difference between the thermal energy extracted from the geothermal field during winter and the energy provided during the summer period for the same simulation group, the cases from A9 to A12 show an average annual thermal energy extraction of 2.39 MWh compared to 9.97 MWh for the A9–A12 group, representing a reduction of approximately 76% in energy extraction.
In
Figure 5 and
Figure 6, the trends in the soil temperature around the borehole field and the
SCOP for the 15 years of dynamic analysis are reported, respectively.
Regarding cases A1–A4,
Figure 5 and
Figure 6 show a decrease in the ground temperature of the field and a decrease in the
SCOP (ground temperature for cases A1 and A4 of 12 °C and 10.9 °C, respectively, at the fifteenth year of the dynamic simulation;
SCOP in the last year of 3.72 and 3.54 for cases A1 and A4, respectively). A peculiar aspect regards the
SCOP and ground temperature trends in case A4: the
SCOP trends tend to be constant starting from the fifth year, whereas the ground temperature shows a decreasing trend also in the latter years of the simulations.
Figure 5a shows no important changes in the amplitude of the ground temperature for cases A1–A4, even if the ground field is undersized.
The reduction in thermal energy demand from the ground field obtained using the solar collectors in cases A5–A12 leads to a stabilization of the ground temperature after five years at values between 12.8 °C and 13.4 °C (13.4 °C is obtained by the four simulations A9–A12 that consider a collector area of 40 m
2. The use of solar collectors leads to a stabilization of the
SCOP, similar to cases A1–A4, but to higher values (
Figure 6b)).
In all the cases that consider the solar collectors with respect to cases A1–A4, from
Figure 5b,c, an increase in ground temperature amplitude during the year can be observed: in particular, the amplitude results higher for the cases that present undersized probes (i.e., A8, A7, A11, and A12) with respect to the well-sized ground field.
Furthermore,
Figure 5 shows that the amplitude of temperature fluctuations tends to decrease as the number of simulation years increases, compared to the early simulation years, stabilizing and being consistently higher in the case of the undersized borehole field systems compared to the well-sized borehole field systems, even in the presence of solar thermal panels. Meanwhile, the
SCOP tends to stabilize in the final years of the simulation.
Another aspect that can be observed from
Figure 6 is the increase in
SCOP considering the same ground field due to the coupling with solar collectors: for instance, if we consider that the field was made of 25 boreholes, the case without solar collectors (case A1) and the case in which the field was coupled with solar collectors (cases A5 and A9), the percentage increases in the
SCOP in the fifteenth year were 2.7% and 3.8%, respectively, for A5 and A9l, with respect to A4. When analyzing the
SCOP for the undersized field made of 10 boreholes, the increases were 2.5% and 3.7%, respectively, for A8 and A12, with respect to A4.