Economic, Technical, and Environmental Benefits of Occupants’ Thermal Comfort-Based Heat Loads Participation in Demand Response Program

Abstract

The electrification of heating and transportation systems is one of the objectives of developed countries to minimize CO2 emissions. This objective pushes distribution systems’ (DBs) operators to incorporate numerous high-power loads into low-voltage networks that were not designed for such loads. DBs’ reconfiguration and the loads’ flexible characteristics are two remedies exploited to overcome this issue. Heat pumps (HPs), as the most prevalent loads, can be managed by demand response programs (DRPs) to postpone the costly reconfiguration of distribution systems. HPs’ DRP participation affects indoor air temperature. If this is not accomplished reasonably, the occupants’ thermal comfort (OTC) will be compromised, and it will be impossible to convince them to continue contributing to DRPs. Based on the ASHRAE55 standard and an experimental building electrothermal model, this article presents a novel framework for determining the HPs’ DRPs participation. This framework ensures the OTC and optimizes the HPs’ DRP participation. The modified IEEE 33-bus network is employed as the test system to evaluate the proposed method. The simulation results confirm the usefulness of the proposed strategy to improve the technical and economic aspects of the network.