A study of operation strategy of small scale heat storage devices in residential distribution feeders

Passive operation of thermal energy storage devices is a well established concept in Europe; this paper looks at active operation of thermal storage devices and their role in providing demand response from residential distribution feeders. It co-simulates the power system and the thermal performance of buildings to investigate the effect of operation strategy of thermal energy storage devices on the network and thermal comfort of households. A realistic residential feeder is used to demonstrate the applicability of the presented methodology. It is shown that the operation strategy of the thermal storage devices can affect the realizable reserve from these devices, house temperature and network variables such as losses and voltage. The realizable demand response found by the presented methodology can be used for market operation to avoid underestimation and overestimation of the demand response.