Energy Model for Municipality Flexibility Investigation

Abstract

Electrifying the energy system with heat pumps and electric vehicles is a strategy of many countries to reduce CO2 emissions. Large electrification, however, poses several new challenges for the electricity system, particularly in combination with a simultaneous substitution of nuclear power plants by volatile renewables such as photovoltaics. The increasing consumption of electricity and the growing number of installed photovoltaic systems are pushing the existing electrical grid to its limits. Today's grid must be expanded with smart controllers and their components regulated. For this purpose, an understanding of the flexible participants such as boilers, heat pumps and electric vehicles, but also of the new production facilities such as photovoltaic systems must be built up. The aim of this work is to develop an energy model in which the change of these components can be simulated and analysed. To achieve this, data such as weather data, installed boiler capacities, installed photovoltaic capacities, heat pump data and installed vehicle charging stations were collected over the entire municipality. Afterwards, a load profile generator was created, which is supposed to generate a suitable profile over a day for different weather conditions, weekdays and holidays.

The Potential of Flexibility Utilisation for Municipalities to Optimally Use the Electricity Grid

“…1. By considering past load data and weather forecasts, an overall load profile for the next 24 hours is generated by using the Energy Model [7]. This overall profile of the municipality is then given to the ES where its loads are being scheduled, considering shifting limitations and consumer preferences as well as the optimised profile parameterised.…”

“…This leads to a more irregular distribution of the flexibilities during the day. The existing EM was used as the basis for the load profiles [7]. Boiler load profiles are not being adapted and further analysed in these simulations, as the tendency clearly shows, in all scenarios of the energy perspectives, that the consumption will decline over the next years and will therefore decrease its importance of a flexibility.…”