Heat Pumps and District Heating¶
A heat pump is a device used to heat water and premises by extracting heat from one place (air source, water source, and ground source/geothermal) and moving it to another (some pumps also have a cooling function but only heating is considered here). Depending on the external temperature and the heating needs, a heat pump usually has a coefficient of performance (COP) of around 2-4, which means that it is able to produce 2-4 kWh of heat by consuming 1 kWh of electricity. In the Grid Singularity Exchange, the heat pump is modelled as a load, which consumes electricity and generates heat (see heat pump configuration options here). If the heat pump has a storage option (water tank) then this is accounted for by a dedicated Heat Pump Asset Trading Strategy, which facilitates flexibility trading by leveraging the heat storage capabilities of the water tank.
For homes (or other energy community participants) that are connected to district heating we have developed a digital twin of a heat pump that mimics and replaces the heat demand currently satisfied by a district heating network, modelled as a virtual heat pump (VHP) with storage and a related trading strategy. This VHP implementation is available exclusively in the backend source code, since it will likely be used exclusively by energy researchers to simulate how district heating could be replaced by a heat pump to compare their respective performance. Inversely, the VHP can also be used to calculate the heat demand of homes or other energy community participants, and consequently enable the simulation of a district heating connection that would satisfy this heat demand as opposed to electricity assets.
Finally, for simulations that simply want to account for the district heating connection without considering a potential replacement with heat pumps, the digital twin of the district heating supply for the measured heat demand can be modelled as a "heat market maker", i.e. digital trading agent with a specific trading strategy representing the district heating provider, which will only sell heat energy to the heat demand digital twin of the respective community member. The selling price of this market maker will be the district heating price that the heat consumer currently pays, in cents/kWh. The heat demand digital twin, in turn, is modelled as a load with a “consumption profile” defined by the measured heat demand in kWh. Thus, the “heat market maker” will only be used in order to cover the heat demand of the heat load and accounting for the monetary cost of heating.
The heat pump and the virtual heat pump development has been undertaken in the framework of the HYPERGRYD Project, funded by the European Union’s H2020 Programme under Grant Agreement No. 101036656.