District cooling optimal operation to decarbonize urban cold energy supply

District Energy Systems have seen growing attention for heat supply while, for meeting the cooling demand still, the applications are limited to tropical Countries. Given that, the deployment of district cooling systems has still many barriers, requires detailed planning and related dispatch to be found convenient in contexts with few applications already set. In this paper, the authors investigate the role of alternative district cooling plant layouts that include Combined Heat & Power equipment’s to meet a cooling demand. If, on the one hand, the increase of the District Cooling Plant layout complexity increases the investment costs, on the other hand, the reduction of the primary energy consumption makes this alternative attractive and of interest, especially for large capacity. By introducing the Levelized Cost of Cold Energy, the equivalent cost for 1 kWh of cold energy is of about 0.011€ in the baseline scenario, while for the best-optimized layout decreases to 0.09 €. Aside from the economic investigation, the optimisation procedure identified that a system made up of two twin cogeneration units (3 MWe internal combustion engine) and 3.3 MWc absorption chiller leads to 12% reduction of carbon emissions compared to the baseline, together with 0.5 million € saving, accounting for a carbon tax rate of 100 €/ton.