Regulation Strategies for Grid-Friendly Interaction of District Cooling System and Their Benefit Evaluation

The air-conditioning system consumes 40%-60% of total energy used in building energy consumption, and the proportion of air conditioner load to the total load has reached 30%-50% in summer, posing a major challenge to power grid load pressure as well as energy saving and carbon reduction. As a high-quality interactive terminal of the power grid, the all-electric district cooling system allows for a demand response strategy of great significance to raise system economy and power grid stability. To address insufficient understanding of interaction between district cooling system and power grid plus an imperfect benefit evaluation mechanism in existing studies, this paper proposes two grid-friendly interaction regulation strategies to maximize cooling benefits, and constructs a co-simulation model and a collaborative evaluation system of quality and quantity. Taking a district cooling project in Shanghai as an example, Typical Day Simulation is employed to compare between the performance of the conventional operation mode and that of two response ones. The results show that the price-based and incentive-based strategies reduce costs by 38.8% and 45.3%, respectively, compared to the conventional model, and improve system efficiency from 4.38 to 4.72 and 4.62, respectively. The incentive-based strategy enables a power reduction of 2172 kW in half an hour or 1037 kW in two hours while meeting the needs of users and reduces the power consumption by 25% during the peak period. The present paper provides a quantitative basis and practical path for the participation of district cooling systems in grid demand response.