Short-Term Control of Heat Pumps to Support Power Grid Operation

The increasing adoption of heat pumps presents new challenges for power grids, including the potential overloading of transformers and cables. To address this issue, in this work, a model predictive control for a low-temperature district heating network is proposed to prevent the overloading of transformers and cables. A comprehensive control strategy that considers various factors influencing the flexibility of heat pumps is introduced. The considered factors include integrating distributed energy resources (DER) such as a photovoltaic system, a battery energy storage system, and flexible indoor temperatures. The control mechanism is validated through a hardware-in-the-loop cosimulation setup, ensuring practical applicability and operational feasibility. The results indicate that with the proposed control, the power consumption of the heat pumps is reduced to alleviate overloading issues. To meet the power consumption constraints imposed on the heat pumps the gas usage by the heating grid would increase up to 506% of the level in the case without power constraints. However, by integrating DERs, along with leveraging the flexibility in indoor temperature, this additional gas usage is limited to 135%.