Price policy estimation for Demand Response of heat-pump-based loads

Abstract: The electricity grids have become a key player in the society. An increased usage of electricity is both a result from the more electrified society, but also as a main solver in reaching the climate goals by reducing emissions. This thesis work explores some of the new features for the electricity grid from integration of electrification from renewable energy resources (RES) and from strategies for energy optimization related to the loads and specifically from thermal heat pumps. These strategies lie in the field of demand response, which takes advantage of the flexibility of loads in terms of willingness to switch or decrease their consumption at a particular moment of the day. This research proposes a three-step framework to harness the flexibility of Thermo-Statically controlled loads (TCLs) based on a simulated grey-box building model that uses historical outside temperature and prices data and learns the thermal parameters such as Thermal Resistance, Thermal Capacitance, but also price responsiveness (pth ) through a Differential Evolution (DE) based optimization algorithm. The price responsiveness is used to provide further insight into the flexibility of the loads and is employed in the last step to propose a price policy estimation algorithm also based on DE that minimizes the gap between supply and demand while preserving supplier and customer profitability. The proposed approach has proven to be accurate for a large number of parameters but also effective with reduced training data (prediction errors around 2.5% on the power average and standard deviation), as well as to be successful in providing a Day-Ahead Real-Time Price policy that maximizes supplier and customer utility. The price policy provides a lower total price for the customer compared with a tariff without demand response (reduction up to 53.63 %), reduces the gap between RES-based energy sources and heating demand, and respects grid technical constraints.