Improving the interaction between net-ZEB and the grid using advanced control of heat pumps

Design principles in Net-ZEB consider the local en-ergy infrastructure as the virtual storage. Thus a large amount of energy exchange occurs with the grid and these buildings rely heavily on the grid to reach an-nual zero balance. Wide-spread application of such buildings could soon saturate the grid hosting capacity and limits their effectiveness on larger scale. In order to design buildings that effectively interact with the grid, well-designed energy solutions are paramount. As the recent market trends show strong growth in heat pumps and the photovoltaic applications, this study in-vestigates the flexibility of such all-electric Net-ZEB (using electric heat pump with photovoltaic) that it could offer to the grid. Four different strategies of heat pump with thermal energy storage (TES) are compared to a directly coupled heat pump (reference) case. The flexibility of these cases to self-consume the onsite electrical production and reduce their inter-action/impact on the grid is analyzed. Results shows that using the TES with proper control can lead to 10%increase in the self-consumption, 35% reduction in the peak-exchange hours and 5% reduction in import bills. The results show that major part of the improvement in the self-consumption and exchange hours can al-ready be realized using standard-sized TES with ap-plication of proper control. However, the reduction in import bills has more strong dependency on TES ca-pacity. In overall, results shows that with proper ap-plication of control strategy, significant maneuvering space in demand-supply matching could be achieved at the level of an individual building.