A recommendation system of an operational strategy for heat pumps with thermal energy storage

Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is a power grid stabilization technology which responds demand response (DR) signal for management of demand-side energy resources. Our research group has intended to construct widely applicable VPP system to several types of demand-side energy resources such as generator, load, and storage. From those resources, existing heat pump (HP) and thermal storage tank (TST) onto residential, commercial, and industrial sectors are attractive energy resources to DR because it is easy to shift peak power by storage. The difficulty of VPP depends on system configuration to compensate for forecast error, for example, whether the system has a backup power source, whether the system has enough buffer or not. In this context, the difficulty of the system consisting of HP and TST is that it generally does not have a backup power source, so it is necessary to improve the accuracy of demand forecast and to develop operational strategy with sufficient supply capacity. The paper shows the concept that extending our previous works on VPP management method, the paper proposes to add a function block of operation guidance to help operator's decision making in DR periods.