The Building as Energy Storage: Sector Coupling for Peak Shaving in Active Energy Communities

The expansion of renewable energy generation and electrification of heating has increased and substantially instigated electrical energy demand, and thus ensuring grid stability nowadays is a complex challenge. Batteries provide a costly solution to alleviate this issue and their limited availability continues to present a significant barrier. As a more viable approach, this paper explores the utilization of existing residential appliances, such as heat pumps, to mitigate peak loads through sector coupling. Therefore, a heat demand model for residential buildings is derived and simulated to analyze the energy flexibility provided by the thermal mass of buildings. The key findings on how active energy control and energy storage, particularly within energy communities, demonstrate the potential of leveraging heat pump systems as a method for power peak shaving without battery systems. This study emphasizes on the analogy of a building’s thermal mass and batteries, resulting in a reduction of peak loads on substations by 25%. It is underscored that heat pump capacity correlates linearly to an equivalent battery capacity.