Demand side management of the built environment for sustainable energy

The current electricity market, characterized by increasing energy demand and growing penetration of renewable energies, presents a number of challenges to grid operators and is moving toward the Smart Grid infrastructure which includes the Demand Side Management (DSM) concept. Due to the energy consumption involved, an interesting and promising field of application of DSM is the management of the electrically driven thermal systems in buildings. This study focuses on energy demand in buildings for heating and cooling produced by heat pumps (HP), that will hopefully have an increasing penetration in the field of room air-conditioning, given the potential improvement in energy efficiency achievable. Moreover heat pumps are seen as a promising technology for load management in the built environment, also coupled with Thermal Energy Storage (TES) systems to shift electrical loads on the basis of grid request. Main purpose of this paper is to analyze the DSM potential of heating and cooling loads in residential buildings while using heat pumps. Different building characteristics, plant configurations and DSM strategies will be considered.