Power Systems Flexibility from District Heating Networks

Coupling heat and electricity systems can improve the overall flexibility of the energy system and facilitate the large-scale penetration of renewable energy sources. In order to optimally exploit the operational flexibility of District Heating Networks (DHN), we introduce a novel mixed integer nonlinear formulation of the combined heat and power dispatch, accounting for pipeline energy storage. To cope with the non-convexities and computational complexity of this model we propose mixed integer convex quadratic and mixed integer linear relaxations. The proposed model is implemented on a six-bus electricity and three-node district heating network and compared to a conventional economic dispatch model, in order to evaluate the impact of the DHN on the power system.