Demand Side Management of a Building Summer Cooling Load by Means of a Thermal Energy Storage

Due to their non-deterministic behaviour, renewable energies are defined non-dispatchable and they are largely coupled with thermal energy storage (TES) systems to overcome the problem of matching energy production and demand. Hence, interest on TES is growing in energy conservation field, especially while combined with demand side management (DSM) concept, being DSM the need of shaping the electricity consumption of the final user on the basis of grid requests. In this work an existing installation of a TES system coupled with heat pumps is presented. A dynamic simulation model was built up and validated by means of experimental data for the summer season cooling requirements. The simulations performed were used to show the load shifting potential of such storage and energy and cost savings were assessed.