Optimal Scheduling of Electric Heat Pumps Combined with Thermal Storage for Power Peak Shaving

With the transition towards the smart grid paradigm, end-users are expected to play a more and more active role by offering their flexibility to support the efficient operation of electric networks. This paper investigates the potential given by a Demand Side Management program for the control of electric heat pumps combined with thermal storage aimed at reducing the power peaks in the grid. To this purpose, the assessment of the building thermal loads is performed according to the standard ISO 13790 and a mixed integer linear programming optimization is applied to schedule the operation of the electric heat pumps. Preliminary results show that decoupling thermal load and electricity consumption by using the thermal storage guarantees a large flexibility, which can be exploited to achieve important benefits at grid level without affecting the thermal comfort of final customers.