A simplified methodology for existing tertiary buildings’ cooling energy need estimation at district level: A feasibility study of a district cooling system in Marrakech

In district energy systems planning, the calculation of energy needs is a crucial step in making the investment profitable. Although several computational approaches exist for estimating the thermal energy need of individual buildings, this is challenging at the district level due to the amount of data needed, the diversity of building types, and the uncertainty of connections. The aim of this paper is to present a simplified measurement-based methodology for estimating the cooling energy needs at the district level, which can be employed in the preliminary sizing and design of a district cooling network. The methodology proposed is suitable for tertiary buildings and is based on building electricity bills as historical data to calculate the yearly cooling demand. Then, the developed method is applied to a real case study: the feasibility analysis of a sustainable district cooling network for a hotel district in the city of Marrakech. The designed system foresees a 23-MWcold district cooling network that is 4 km long, supplying 26 GWh of cooling to the tourist area. The results show that the proposed methodology for cooling demand estimation is coherent with the other existing methods in the literature.