Optimization of integrated building solutions: efficiency of a heating and cooling ground source heat pump

In order to deal effectively with energy supplies and climate change, it is imperative to move towards more sustainable solutions. For the housing sector which represents 45% of a country’s overall energy expenditure and one quarter of carbon dioxide production, it is essential that a building is no longer a mere consumer of energy, but it should become an energy producer. There is a need to optimize integrated solutions to the building envelope. With soil as the sole source for deriving heat, the efficiency of a heating and cooling pump was assessed. The research also focused on analysis of socioeconomic aspects, related to the integration of renewable energy in the habitat, that included action on the issue of technology transfer from laboratories to industry and secondly, the extent of the social acceptability of these new forms of energy and direction, by the adoption of appropriate economic policy measures. The feasibility study in this work showed that heating and cooling through a system of ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) is possible based on economics and optimizing energy efficiency used in the town of Tlemcen in Algeria as a case study. The optimal depth to place a heat pump for air conditioning and heating was similar, so that the same depth could be considered for both applications. Note that this is the first study of GSHP in Algeria.