Scenarios of technical and useful ground-source heat pump potential for building heating and cooling in Western Switzerland

This dataset contains an estimation of the useful and technical potential of shallow ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs) for Western Switzerland, at a spatial resolution of 400 x 400 m². The technical potential is hereby defined as the maximum energy that could be extracted from GSHP systems in case of their dense deployment, such as to avoid the over-exploitation of the heat capacity of the ground. We consider GSHPs with vertical closed-loop borehole heat exchangers (BHE) installed at depths of 50 - 200 m. The useful potential is defined as the potential that could be delivered to building heating and cooling systems via a water-to-water heat pump.

The datasets contains future scenarios of heating and cooling demand, space cooling equipment deployment (service sector only) and climate change models and considers the potential use of DHC. The dataset covers around 80,000 property units (parcels) in the Swiss Cantons of Vaud and Geneva, excluding only the areas of the Alps and the Jura mountains.

The data package contains information on the available area for GSHP systems, the heating and cooling demand as well as the resulting technical and useful potentials for all simulated scenarios of future cooling demand (200 Monte Carlo runs), for the case of direct heat supply (per pixel of 400 x 400 m²) as well as for district heating and cooling (DHC). In scenarios without DHC (direct heat supply), the results are summarized by pixel of 400 x 400 m². In scenarios with DHC, the results of potentials within DHCs are summarized by DHC (see *_in_dhc.csv) while potentials outside of DHCs are summarized by pixel (see *_outside_dhc.csv).

For details on the methodology applied to obtain the results provided in the data package, please refer to the above-mentioned research articles. A description of all files is provided in Dataset documentation.pdf and metadata is provided in Datapackage.json.