Quantifying the potential of smart heat pump control to increase the self consumption of photovoltaic electricity in buildings

Abstract

Energy management systems that efficiently use self-produced renewable energy are becoming popular. However, quantifying their benefits in terms of self-consumption increase and associated financial benefits, is difficult in real life conditions. In that context, the Prosumer-Lab project was launched. In the latter, a building, grid and photovoltaic installation are emulated and real energy management systems can be connected for evaluation. In this article, we describe various control strategies for energy management systems and benchmark their yearly performance in simulation in order to quantify the potential of the different approaches. This works is the first step towards the identification of possible improvements.