Combined Heat and Power Scheduling: Utilizing Building-Level Thermal Inertia for Short-Term Thermal Energy Storage in District Heat System

A major limitation to integrating wind power in electric power system (EPS) is the massive generation capacity of the high-penetration inflexible combined heat and power (CHP) units in district heating system (DHS). A heat and power optimal dispatch is established in this study to exploit building-level thermal inertia as a form of short-term thermal energy storage (TES) to unlock the flexibility of CHP units. This proposed short-term building TES can provide storage potential by utilizing small variations in indoor temperature under the proposed dispatch control model to control the storage capacity in the dispatch process. A linear optimization operational model is run to integrate energy systems by balancing heat and power demands over multiple time periods with CHP units, wind power, short-term building TES, and district-level heating network (DHN) storage capacity. A two-stage decomposition-coordination iteration algorithm is proposed to solve this optimization program. The simulation results are analyzed to determine the potential benefits of this short-term TES in terms of economics, wind power integration, and the flexibility of CHP units. (C) 2018 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.