Abstract
To achieve a successful integration of fluctuating renewable power generation, the power-to-heat (P2H) conversion is seen as an efficient solution that remedies the issue of curtailments as well as reduces carbon emissions prevailing in the district heating (DH) sector. Concurrently, the need for storage is also increasing to maintain a continuous power supply. Hence, this paper presents a MILP-based model to optimize the size of thermal storage required to satisfy the annual DH demand of a community solely by P2H conversion employing renewable energy. The DH is supplied by the optimal operation of a novel 2-km deep well heat pump system (DWHP) equipped with thermal storage. To avoid computational intractability, representative time steps with varying time duration are chosen by employing hierarchical agglomerative clustering that aggregates adjacent hours chronologically. The value of demand response and the effect of interannual weather variability are also analyzed. Numerical results from a Finnish case study show that P2H conversion utilizing small thermal storage in tandem with the DWHP is able to cover the annual DH demand, thus leading to a carbon-neutral DH system and, at the same time, mitigating the curtailment of excessive wind generation. Compared with the annual DH demand, an average thermal storage size of 29.17 MWh (2.58%) and 13.99 MWh (1.24%) are required in the business-as-usual and the demand response cases, respectively.
Highlights
Wind curtailment level was set to 10% at the most, and the thermal storage parameters were set as η ch = η dch = 0.9, initial SoC was 50% and loss coefficient μ = 0.2% per hour
2 h 16 min Renewable energy sources can play a decisive role in reducing carbon emissions that are proliferating in the district heating sector
This work was aimed at mitigating curtailments from the perspective of power systems and simultaneously concluded a zero-emission district heating system by utilizing direct P2H conversion from wind generation
Summary
The share of renewable energy generation capacity is substantially increasing in energy systems. A key strategy is to replace centralized fossil fuel-based energy generation with widely distributed clean renewable sources. This points to a massive energy transition ahead, including long-term planning of generation expansion and storage capacity. This clean energy transition includes the electrical power sector and necessitates more actions in the district heating (DH) sector, as most of the end-use energy in Europe is in the form of heating [1]. Heating and domestic hot water, together, constitute over 80% of the households’ end-use energy in Finland [2]
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