About the project
The aim of this project is to assess, control, and manage thermal storage potentials and flexibility at both building and district levels to enable the complete renewable, smart, resource, and cost-efficient energy systems. Current district heating (DH) systems and existing buildings are huge free assets to store thermal energy and thereby enable bigger flexibility of the entire energy system. The flexibility can be used to make the heating system more resource-efficient and, thereby, economical and environmentally friendly. To scale up the proposed solutions, the project approaches will be tested on three case studies and several synthetic studies built on the real-time long-term measurements.
The project concept is based on a unique smart control idea to optimise, at the same time, the demand side based on the variable energy prices and the supply side based on the resulting demand prediction and, thereby, to use renewables in a resource-efficient way for heating and cooling purposes. To fully utilise all possibilities for flexibility in energy systems, with the increasing deployment of electric vehicles (EV) and photovoltaic (PV) deployment in the residential sector, this project will also evaluate how EVs and PVs can be optimally coupled with DH (e.g., via heat pumps (HPs)), as well as their potentials in balancing the demand and supply in both the heating and electricity sectors.
