How heat pumps and thermal energy storage can be used to manage wind power: A study of Ireland

Abstract

Although energy for heating and cooling represents the largest proportion of demand, little progress towards meeting environmental targets has been achieved in these sectors. The recent rapid progress in integrating renewable energy into the electricity sector however, can help in decarbonising heat by electrification. This paper investigates the impacts and benefits of heat electrification in a wind dominated market by considering two options; with heat pumps, and with direct electric heating, both operated with energy storage. The Irish all-island electricity market is used as a case study. Modelling results reveal the significant potential of heat pump electrification, delivering at least two and three times less carbon emissions respectively, when compared with conventional options such as gas or oil for 20% of domestic sector of the All Ireland market. Heat electrification using direct, resistive heating systems is found to be the most carbon intensive method. Energy storage systems combined with heat pumps could deliver potentially significant benefits in terms of emissions reductions, efficient market operation and mitigating the impacts of variable renewable energy on baseload generation. The main barrier to heat electrification in the all island market is the absence of appropriate policy measures to support relevant technologies.

Flexibility from Electric Boiler and Thermal Storage for Multi Energy System Interaction

“…In order to schedule the time of operation of the EB to charge the hot water storage tank, the optimization procedure given by (11) and (12) are followed. The objective function is to minimize the cost of electricity for production of hot water to meet the demand and storage needs.…”

“…Here The optimization problem was solved by minimizing the cost function using brute force optimization in MATLAB. All possible candidates for the solutions are generated and then checked against the satisfaction of problem statement as given in (11) and (12). For more than one solutions, the solution with less ON/OFF operation of EB is selected.…”

“…The perspective of heat electrification in a wind dominated market using resistive heating and storage is the most carbon-intensive method [11] with lower investment cost compared to HP [9,12]. Further, large HPs take a long time from a cold start until they reach their optimal efficiency.…”

Experimental analysis of defrosting and heating performance of a solar‐assisted heat pump integrated phase change energy storage

“…Market data shows that there is a sharp increase in the implementation and development of new heat pump technologies with higher coefficient of performances (COPs). At present, there is great interest in using heat pumps to save energy and using fuel and energy sources effectively …”

“…At present, there is great interest in using heat pumps to save energy and using fuel and energy sources effectively. [4][5][6] Currently, there are three main types of heat pumps namely water source heat pumps, ground source heat pumps and air source heat pumps. A ground watersource heat pump system with air pre-conditioning (GWHP-FAP) was proposed from the perspective of cascade utilization of low-level energy stored in the groundwater.…”