Mutual Impacts of Procuring Energy Flexibility and Equipment Degradation at the Residential Consumers Level

Nowadays, residential consumers can play a key role in providing flexibility services on grids. The present work proposes a multi-objective approach to assess the impacts of peak shaving and flexibility capacity control objectives on end user costs and equipment degradation. To identify and limit the effects of introduced services on the lifetime of equipment, aging indices are defined and included into the model as penalties. Four different sets of flexible resources are considered: (1) dishwasher (DW), (2) DW and photovoltaic (PV) panels coupled with Electric Energy Storage (ESS), (3) Heat Pumps (HP) coupled with Thermal Energy Storage (TES), (4) a combination of all the previous resources. The resulting optimal control problems of each type are modeled as mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problems. The proposed model is applied to 2000 test cases of buildings with these four types of flexible resources. Results show that the introduction of flexibility terms alongside the energy cost in the control objective increases the energy bill by less than 0.5%, while reducing the peak demand by around 11% and increasing the flexibility capacity by around 16.5%. Applying proper equipment aging indices reduces the peak shaving capability, while it does not impact the flexibility capacity significantly.

Automated summary

A multi-objective approach was proposed to evaluate the impacts of peak shaving and flexibility capacity control on end user costs and equipment degradation. Test cases showed that introducing flexibility terms increased energy costs by less than 0.5%, reduced peak demand by around 11%, and increased flexibility capacity by approximately 16.5%.