Flexibility Estimation of Residential Heat Pumps under Heat Demand Uncertainty

Zhengjie You, Michel Zade, Babu Kumaran Nalini and Peter Tzscheutschler
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Zhengjie You: Energy Economy and Application Technology, TUM Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Munich, 80333 Munich, Germany
Michel Zade: Energy Economy and Application Technology, TUM Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Munich, 80333 Munich, Germany
Babu Kumaran Nalini: Energy Economy and Application Technology, TUM Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Munich, 80333 Munich, Germany
Peter Tzscheutschler: Energy Economy and Application Technology, TUM Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Munich, 80333 Munich, Germany

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 18, 1-19

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.

Keywords: heat pump flexibility; demand-side response; energy management; optimization; forecast uncertainty; comfort loss (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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