The work presented in this paper relates to a small scale district heating network heated by a gas fired CHP. In most common situations, such a CHP is heat driven operated, meaning that the CHP will switch on whenever heat is needed, while not taking into account the demand of electricity at that time. In this paper however, an active control strategy is developed, aiming to maximize the profit of the CHP, selling its electricity to the spot market. The CHP will therefore switch on at moments of high electricity prices. Nevertheless, since there never is a perfect match between the demand of heat and the demand of electricity, a thermal energy storage is included in the network to overcome the difference between supply and demand of heat in the network. In this study, three different storage concepts are compared: (1) a central buffer tank next to the CHP; (2) small storage vessels distributed over the different connected buildings; and (3) the use of the thermal mass if the buildings as storage capacity. Besides the development of the control algorithms based on model predictive control, a simulation model of the network is described to evaluate the performance of the different storage concept during a representative winter week. The results show that the presented control algorithm can significantly influence the heat demand profile of the connected buildings. As a results, active control of the CHP can drastically increase the profit of the CHP. The concept with the distributed buffers gives the best results, however the profit for the thermal mass concept is only marginally smaller. Since in this latter case no significant investment costs are needed, the conclusion for this case study is that the use of thermal mass of buildings for demand side management in district heating systems is very promising.
Modern district heating technologies have a great potential to make the energy sector more flexible and sustainable due to their capabilities to use energy sources of varied nature and to efficiently store energy for subsequent use. Central control tasks within these systems for the efficient and safe distribution of heat refer to the stabilization of overall system temperatures and the regulation of storage units state of charge. These are challenging goals when the networked and nonlinear nature of district heating system models is taken into consideration. In this letter, for district heati…
Flow and storage volume regulation is essential for the adequate transport and management of energy resources in district heating systems. In this letter, we propose a novel and suitably tailored -- decentralized -- adaptive control scheme addressing this problem whilst offering closed-loop stability guarantees. We focus on a system configuration comprising multiple heat producers, consumers and storage tanks exchanging energy through a common distribution network, which are features of modern and prospective district heating installations. {\color{black}The proposed controller is based on pas…
Massive adoptions of combined heat and power (CHP) units necessitate the coordinated operation of power system and district heating system (DHS). Exploiting the reconfigurable property of district heating networks (DHNs) provides a cost-effective solution to enhance the flexibility of the power system by redistributing heat loads in DHS. In this paper, a unit commitment considering combined electricity and reconfigurable heating network (UC-CERHN) is proposed to coordinate the day-ahead scheduling of power system and DHS. The DHS is formulated as a nonlinear and mixed-integer model with consid…
We propose a comprehensive nonlinear ODE-based thermo-hydraulic model of a district heating system featuring several heat producers, consumers and storage devices which are interconnected through a distribution network of meshed topology whose temperature dynamics are explicitly considered. Moreover, we analyze the conditions under which the hydraulic and thermal subsystems of the model exhibit shifted passivity properties. For the hydraulic subsystem, our claims on passivity draw on the monotonicity of the vector field associated to the DH system's flow dynamics, which mainly codifies viscous…
The 4th generation of district heating systems face a potential problem where lowered water temperatures lead to higher flow rates, which requires higher hydraulic capacity in terms of pipe and pump sizes. This increases the effect of the already existing issue of hydraulic bottlenecks, causing peripheral units (customers) to experience reduced flow rates. A coordinating control strategy is presented in this work aimed at reducing the effect of such bottlenecks on the comfort of customers. This is done by distributing the flow deficit over many units rather than a few. Previous works mainly fo…
Although electric power networks and district heating networks are physically coupled, they are not operated in a coordinated manner. With increasing penetration of renewable energy sources, a coordinated market-based operation of the two networks can yield significant advantages, as reduced need for grid reinforcements, by optimizing the power flows in the coupled systems. Transactive control has been developed as a promising approach based on market and control mechanisms to coordinate supply and demand in energy systems, which when applied to power systems is being referred to as transactiv…
At high latitudes, many cities adopt a centralized heating system to improve the energy generation efficiency and to reduce pollution. In multi-tier systems, so-called district heating, there are a few efficient approaches for the flow rate control during the heating process. In this paper, we describe the theoretical methods to solve this problem by deep reinforcement learning and propose a cloud-based heating control system for implementation. A real-world case study shows the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed system controlled by humans, and the simulated experiments for deep…
Achieving efficiency gains in Chinese district heating networks, thereby reducing their carbon footprint, requires new optimal control methods going beyond current industry tools. Focusing on the secondary network, we propose a data-driven deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach to address this task. We build a recurrent neural network, trained on simulated data, to predict the indoor temperatures. This model is then used to train two DRL agents, with or without expert guidance, for the optimal control of the supply water temperature. Our tests in a multi-apartment setting show that both ag…
Poznan University of Technology（波兹南理工大学）；Kogeneracja Zachód S.A.（西部热电股份公司）
In this paper, we consider energy demand prediction in district heating systems. Effective energy demand prediction is essential in combined heat power systems when offering electrical energy in competitive electricity markets. To address this problem, we propose two sets of algorithms: (1) a novel extension to the algorithm proposed by E. Dotzauer and (2) an autoregressive predictor based on hour-of-week adjusted linear regression on moving averages of energy consumption. These two methods are compared against state-of-the-art artificial neural networks. Energy demand predictor algorithms hav…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究所）；Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）；Melentiev Energy Systems Institute of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院西伯利亚分院梅连季耶夫能源系统研究所）
Combined heat and power dispatch promotes interactions and synergies between electric power systems and district heating systems. However, nonlinear and nonconvex heating flow imposes significant challenges on finding qualified solutions efficiently. Most existing methods rely on constant flow assumptions to derive a linear heating flow model, sacrificing optimality for computational simplicity. This paper proposes a novel convex combined heat and power dispatch model based on model simplification and constraint relaxation, which improves solution quality and avoids assumptions on operating re…
This paper introduces the Maestro library. This library for Python focuses on the design of predictive controllers for small to medium-scale energy networks. It allows non-expert users to describe multi-carrier (electricity, heat, gas) energy networks with a range of energy production, conversion, and storage component classes; together with consumption patterns. Based on this description a predictive controller can be synthesized and tested in simulation. This controller manages the dispatch of energy in the network, making sure that the demands are met, while minimizing the total energy cost…
District cooling energy plants (DCEPs) consisting of chillers, cooling towers, and thermal energy storage (TES) systems consume a considerable amount of electricity. Optimizing the scheduling of the TES and chillers to take advantage of time-varying electricity price is a challenging optimal control problem. The classical method, model predictive control (MPC), requires solving a high dimensional mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) because of the on/off actuation of the chillers and charging/discharging of TES, which are computationally challenging. RL is an attractive alternative to MPC: …
With the increased amount of volatile renewable energy sources connected to the electricity grid, and the phase-out of fossil fuel based power plants, there is an increased need for frequency regulation. On the demand side, frequency regulation services can be offered by buildings or districts that are equipped with electric heating or cooling systems, by exploiting their thermal inertia. Existing approaches for tapping into this potential typically rely on dynamic building models, which in practice can be challenging to obtain and maintain. As a result, practical implementations of such syste…
Non-generating resources such as thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) can arbitrage energy prices and provide balancing reserves when aggregated due to their thermal energy storage capacity. Based on a performed survey of Swedish single- and two-family dwellings with electric heating, this paper quantifies the potential of TCLs to provide reserves to the power system in Sweden. To this end, dwellings with heat pumps and direct electric heaters are modeled as thermal energy storage equivalents that can be included in a linear two-stage problem formulation. We approach the operational flexib…
Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are well proved to be capable to provide operating reserve for power systems. As a type of large-capacity and energy-efficient HVAC system (up to 100 MW), district cooling system (DCS) is emerging in modern cities and has huge potential to be regulated as a flexible load. However, strategically controlling a DCS to provide flexibility is challenging, because one DCS services multiple buildings with complex thermal dynamics and uncertain cooling demands. Improper control may lead to significant thermal discomfort and even deteriorate the…
This paper presents a workflow to evaluate the macro scale thermal fairness for producers in a district heating network during the conceptual design phase of such a network. It uses the workflow to evaluate two types of proposed topologies for a future network to be constructed in Europe. The workflow is also novel in the sense that it has been demonstrated in the paper that within the implementation, the load balancing step can be solved readily by a quantum computing system (in particular, a quantum annealer from DWave). The concept of fairness is also addressed in the workflow and the resul…
In this paper, we propose a convex planning model of integrated heat and electricity systems considering variable mass flow rates. The main challenge comes from the non-convexity of the bilinear terms in the district heating network, i.e., the product of mass flow rate and nodal temperature. To resolve this issue, we first reformulate the district heating network model through equivalent transformation and variable substitution. It shows that the reformulated model has only one set of nonconvex constraints with reduced bilinear terms and the others are linear constraints. Such a reformulation …
