Impacts of domestic electric water heater parameters on demand response

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of the high dimensional parameter space of domestic electric water heaters (DEWH) for demand response (DR). To quantify the consumer comfort a novel metric is introduced considering a stochastic distribution of different water draw events. Incorporating three control algorithms from literature, it is shown that all considered parameters of a DEWH except the heat conductivity have a significant impact on consumer satisfaction. The effect on DR is mainly influenced by the temperature range and the planning horizon, but also by the heat conductivity and the volume. In contrast, the rated power of the heating element and the nominal temperature have no significant impact on the effect on DR. The impacts are analyzed by varying these parameters in a simulation of 1000 DEWHs considering three different controllers: a common thermostat, an exchange price dependent nominal temperature changing mechanism and an energy scheduling algorithm proposed by Du and Lu.