Challenges of heat pumps coupled with building to make them a flexibility tool for the electricity network
Résumé
The EU is setting increasingly ambitious energy and climate targets and is aiming at carbon
neutrality for buildings by 2050. In the building sector, this objective implies restrictions on the
use of fossil fuels in favour of, among others, electricity. Buildings will then become an interesting
tool for grid flexibility, particularly to absorb and store electricity from renewable sources.
Furthermore, heat pumps, whose market is booming, constitute a very efficient electrical heating
technology and will become a pillar of the electrification of buildings in the coming years. Heat
pumps will be a key component of buildings, used as a tool for balancing the grid.
This study presents a comprehensive literature review on flexibility potential. It constitutes the first
step of research works aiming to develop a tool dedicated to the flexibility of heat pumps in
buildings that will optimize and control the entire heat pump and storage system according to the
characteristics of a building to meet a demand for flexibility from the grid.
This literature review shows that heat pumps can offer basic flexibility functionalities such as
self-consumption of locally produced renewable electricity and adaptation to electricity tariffs,
and can receive single orders from the grid. This study also highlights that, due to the wide variety
of configurations and expectations, performance indicators are numerous but not always
comparable and not suitable for an objective of optimizing response to various grid orders. In
addition, we propose an overview of the different categories of controller addressing flexibility.
This study concludes on the future works to be carried out to make the heat pump an efficient
flexibility tool for balancing the grid.