Optimisation of District Heating Cooling systems

Solutions developed

OPTi will treat the DHC system as a system subject to dynamic control, and will treat thermal energy as a resource to be controlled for DHC systems towards saving energy and reducing peak loads. This will lead to the most environmentally-friendly way of utilizing energy sources, thus reducing the reliance on additional boilers running on oil and/or electricity and overall providing a socio-economically sustainable environment.
OPTi will help energy companies to operate both today’s and future DHC systems in an optimal way:
System level: We envision opportunities for SMEs to provide new services/solutions
House level: More intelligent home DHC control systems like remote control and the consumer “virtual knob”
General: We foresee that the OPTi framework will enable engineers to design and plan DHC

Main results

A. - First version of a user interaction system design (Virtual Knob) was developed. This system has been implemented in the LEN office building in Sweden and user thermal comfort feedback data is being collected and analysed.

B. - An approach based on context vector was developed to estimate the baseline consumption of consumers in a DHC network. The approach was evaluated using historical data from Luleå, Sweden and the accuracy of baseline prediction was around 85%.

C. - Regarding consumers’ thermal comfort, an extension of the concept of utility functions has been developed via a novel hybrid approach, which combines the theoretical utility functions, available in the literature, with statistical analysis of data obtained as feedback from the consumers (from the virtual knob).

D. - Two different approaches for incentive based ADR contracts were developed and experimentally evaluated: Fixed versus Learning-based Incentives in ADR Contracts (FLIADR), and Net Benefit-based Incentives in ADR Contracts (NBIADR).

E. - A DR framework was developed to impart fairness with regard to thermal comfort in a DHC network. The approach was evaluated in simulation under various network conditions.

F. - The Smart Energy Generation Algorithm tool (SEGA) (on-going work) is an economic optimisatio