Flexibility Estimation of Residential Heat Pumps under Heat Demand Uncertainty

Zhengjie You,Michel Zade,Babu Kumaran Nalini,Peter Tzscheutschler

doi:10.3390/en14185709

Abstract

With the increasing penetration of intermittent renewable energy generation, there is a growing demand to use the inherent flexibility within buildings to absorb renewable related disruptions. Heat pumps play a particularly important role, as they account for a high share of electricity consumption in residential units. The most common way of quantifying the flexibility is by considering the response of the building or the household appliances to external penalty signals. However, this approach neither accounts for the use cases of flexibility trading nor considers its impact on the prosumer comfort, when the heat pump should cover the stochastic domestic hot water (DHW) consumption. Therefore, in this paper, a new approach to quantifying the flexibility potential of residential heat pumps is proposed. This methodology enables the prosumers themselves to generate and submit the operating plan of the heat pump to the system operator and trade the alternative operating plans of the heat pump on the flexibility market. In addition, the impact of the flexibility provision on the prosumer comfort is investigated by calculating the warm water temperature drops in the thermal energy storage given heat demand forecast errors. The results show that the approach with constant capacity reservation in the thermal energy storage provides the best solution, with an average of 2.5 min unsatisfactory time per day and a maximum temperature drop of 2.3 °C.

Highlights

IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
This paper proposes an novel approach to quantifying the flexibility of heat pumps combined with a thermal energy storage with regard to necessary technical restrictions
It suggests the decentralized flexibility management, which allows the prosumers to manage and utilize the residential flexibility actively. It analyzes the impact of offering flexibility on the thermal comfort of prosumers for the first time, and incorporates a viable solution to cope with the risk of unpredictable domestic hot water consumption

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. With the penetration of intermittent and fluctuating renewable energy generation positioned to increase in the coming years, there is a growing need for low-cost and practical. Ancillary Services (AS) to absorb the renewable related imbalance between generation and demand [1]. Demand Response (DR), the ability to control electrical energy consumption based on power grid incentives, is emerging as a low-cost alternative to conventional fastramping generation resources [2]. The study in [3] foresees that a complete electrification of the heating sector will eventually lead the heat pumps’ demand to reach

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