Abstract
The EU aims to become the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050. In order to meet this target, the integration of high shares of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) in the energy system is of primary importance. Nevertheless, the large deployment of variable renewable sources such as wind and photovoltaic power will pose important challenges in terms of power management. For this reason, increasing the system flexibility will be crucial to ensure the security of supply in future power systems. This work investigates the flexibility potential obtainable from the diffusion of Demand Response (DR) programmes applied to residential heating for different renewables penetration and power system configuration scenarios. To that end, a bottom-up model for residential heat demand and flexible electric heating systems (heat pumps and electric water heaters) is developed and directly integrated into Dispa-SET, an existing unit commitment optimal dispatch model of the power system. The integrated model is calibrated for the case of Belgium and different simulations are performed varying the penetration and type of residential heating technologies, installed renewables capacity and capacity mix. Results show that, at country level, operational cost could be reduced up to €35 million and curtailment up to 1 TWh per year with 1 million flexible electric heating systems installed. These benefits are significantly reduced when nuclear power plants (non-flexible) are replaced by gas-fired units (flexible) and grow when more renewable capacity is added. Moreover, when the number of flexible heating systems increases, a saturation effect of the flexibility is observed.
Highlights
As climate and environmental concern grows, many authorities have set ambitious targets for emission reduction and renewable technologies integration in the power sector
The base case scenario, including the characteristics of the capacity mix, of the system costs and of the electric demand, was defined as the one provided by Dispa-SET for Belgium in 2015 with the total installed capacity composed for around one third by nuclear power, one third by gas-fired units and one quarter from variable renewable sources (16% sun and 10% wind)
This paper presents an innovative modelling framework in which building and domestic hot water (DHW) models are directly integrated within a well-established unit commitment and optimal dispatch model
Summary
As climate and environmental concern grows, many authorities have set ambitious targets for emission reduction and renewable technologies integration in the power sector. In this context, with the presentation of the European Green Deal [1] at the end of 2019, the European Commission announced its ambition to be the first continent reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. Flexibility requirements are fulfilled through flexible generators and large-scale storage facilities (e.g., pumped hydro), but recently, thanks to digitalization and automation technologies, demand response (DR) strategies are getting more and more attention. DR strategies have been studied extensively in the recent years. Different demand response schemes have been proposed (direct load control, curtailable load, demand-side bidding, time-of-use tariffs, peak pricing, real-time pricing) and are extensively described in [4]
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