Exploring flexibility of aggregated residential electric heat pumps

The integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and the electrification of the heating and transportation sectors are stressing the operation of current power systems and call for more flexibility. Domestic electric heat pumps (EHP), which are expected to be widely deployed in the future, can be considered as one potential source of such system flexibility. However, this can also lead to negative impacts for building occupant comfort and to increased peak demand, through reduction in load diversity. Such impacts may be mitigated through the deployment of Thermal Energy Storage (TES), although the benefit this brings is not well understood. Therefore, this paper presents a method to quantify the impact on occupant comfort level and load diversity, through various payback metrics. A validated model is then used to simulate the extraction of reserve capacity from a cluster of 500 domestic buildings with EHPs and different configurations of space heating buffer. Performance in terms of occupant comfort and payback is evaluated.