Simulation of a proposed novel weather forecast control for ground source heat pumps as a mean to evaluate the feasibility of forecast controls’ influence on the photovoltaic electricity self-consumption

Abstract

The building sector in Europe and Sweden accounts for a large part of the total European electricity end use. A large fraction of Swedish buildings are equipped with heat pumps for heating and a combination of heat pumps and decentralized energy generation from photovoltaic systems is an interesting system solution for reducing the energy use. It is important that the building has a high self-consumption of the generated PV-electricity. Self-consumption can be seen as energy conservation and has a considerable higher economic value than exported electricity for the building owner.A ground source heat pump with a novel weather forecast controller is simulated in Trnsys and compared to a reference case in regards to self-consumption and profitability. The economic analysis is based on the annuity method and a sensitivity analysis regarding annual cost, discount rate and annual electricity price change has been performed.The results indicates that the increase in self-consumed photovoltaic electricity is limited to 7% with the proposed novel weather forecast controller, which means that the controller is unprofitable. Because of this the proposed novel forecast controller is not a viable way of increasing self-consumption in systems with photovoltaic systems and ground source heat pumps in Sweden.