Optimization of District Heating Systems: European Energy Exchange Price-Driven Control Strategy for Optimal Operation of Heating Plants

Abstract

District heating (DH) systems are often seen as a good practical approach to meet the local heat demand of districts. Yet, under today's regulations to renovate buildings on high efficiency standards, the local heat demand is decreasing. Therefore, the operation of DH systems is also affected by the changing heat demand profile, which might lead to less profit for the operators of DH systems. Thus, the operators strive for an optimal operation at which the heat demand is met and the profits are maximized. In this work, a control strategy for optimal operation of a combined heat and power (CHP) based DH is presented. The proposed control strategy couples the operation of CHPs to the European energy exchange (EEX) price by implementing different operation constraints. This configuration is accompanied with another, which is the installation of additional storage volume. Thereby it is held to provide the optimal operation for the plant technically and economically.

The Challenge of Planning and Constructing Large-Scale Hot Water TES for District Heating System: A Techno-Economic Analysis

“…There exist some other definitions for the storage efficiency and they are well reported in the literature [13]. In this work, however, the suitability of the chosen definition (Equation ( 4)) is observed since it compares the overall thermal losses to the maximum storage capacity, so it pinpoints the effective volume of the storage as follows: (6) Another reason is that this definition of the TES efficiency is less sensitive to TES operation parameters (e.g. charging/discharging).…”

“…Moreover, it is important to highlight that the application of large-scale TES is not only limited to coupling with ST, but can be efficiently employed with other heat sources, such as industrial waste heat and in combined heat and power (CHP) plants. By virtue of this configuration, TES is capable to decouple partially the power grid and the DH networks and, thereby, it maximizes the profits [6]. However, though this type of TES belongs to the large-scale one (up to several thousand cubic meters), it is often a weekly storage system and, therefore, it is not further discussed in this work from an operational point of view.…”