Conference paper for 2025 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm)
Abstract:
District heating systems operate with multiple sources for heat generation. Integrating additional, especially renewable energy sources to the energy mix, while cost-efficient and greener, may jeopardize meeting thermal-energy demand. Moreover, employing district heating systems to provide flexibility to the power grid appears as a win-win scenario due to the high thermal inertia of buildings and the cheap storage of thermal energy. In this paper, we propose an innovative method for thermal demand response (DR) for multi-energy district heating systems with thermostatically controlled loads that participate in flexibility markets. Our approach aims to maximize the provider’s profit from selling flexibility to the power grid and multi-source heating energy to consumers, while adjusting thermal energy demand to production and ensuring an equitable distribution of thermal discomfort across consumers. In particular, we prove that, under the optimal solution, discomfort is allocated proportionally to the actual reduction in power consumption, thereby aligning financial incentives for flexibility provision with each consumer’s true contribution. Both the temperature set-point adjustments and the associated compensations are determined computationally efficiently by solving a convex optimization problem. The introduced formulation integrates indoor temperature dynamics with a novel spot utility function. This function captures user discomfort using minimum information and without requiring detailed users’ economic modeling, thus rendering our approach practically applicable. Our numerical experiments validate the effectiveness, the computational efficiency and the fairness of the proposed method.
