Climate change is one of the greatest crises facing humanity in the 21st century. It is a complex challenge that affects all levels of society, from the personal to the international level. Only if all parts of the international community work together, it will be possible to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, as agreed in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2015. An important contribution to this must be made in cities and districts, which are becoming

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... more important due to the worldwide progress of urbanization. Within the district, energy demand of buildings has a great influence on the CO2 emissions. A centralized supply of thermal energy via district heating and cooling enables highly efficient generation via combined heat and power or combined heat, power and cooling as well as the integration of locally available waste heat sources from industrial plants or data centers. By means of cost-efficient thermal storage, generation and demand can be decoupled from each other, and operating times of combined heat and power plants can be extended. In addition, renewable sources such as solar thermal energy can be used more efficiently. The basis of this work is a dynamic simulation model of the energy system of campus Lichtwiese of the Technical University of Darmstadt, which represents and connects the generation plants, the thermal networks and the buildings as consumers. Using time series of the current and future energy demand of the buildings for heat, cooling, and electric energy, the energy production of the entire system and the resulting CO2 emissions and costs can be calculated. By comparing different scenarios via annual simulations within the model, the example of campus Lichtwiese shows how existing energy systems can be prepared for a local energy transition at the district level. Research focuses on the optimization of the design and operation of existing energy systems with 3rd generation district heating networks, the reduction of temperatures to transfer [...]