Power system resilience support from heat-pump equipped houses — thermal comfort consequence for various room priority strategies

Swedish single-family houses equipped with heat pumps could serve as valuable flexible resources to support the power system in situations of severe power shortages. Hence, to quantify the flexibility potential by maintaining different temperatures in a multi-room house, a detailed model of a house equipped with a variable speed heat pump is developed. In this study, flexibility is defined as a reduction in the electric power consumption of a heat pump, relative to the electric power consumption when maintaining 20 °C throughout the house. A flexibility of 100% is provided for 5 h, when all rooms reduce thermal comfort equally to about 16 °C, at an outdoor temperature of −5 °C. The same flexibility can also be provided by heating only a smaller area, such as a better insulated bedroom, which is 8% of the total floor area, to 17.5 °C, while ensuring that the temperatures in the other rooms do not fall below 10 °C. After the first five hours, the flexibility decreases from 100% to 47% and 57%, respectively, in the above cases, for as long as the flexibility required. The impact of offering various levels of flexibility in relation to thermal comfort is demonstrated and quantified in this article. • Modelling and simulation of a multi-room house equipped with heat pump. • Developing a controller to control different temperatures in a multi-room house. • Flexibility potential in relation to thermal comfort is quantified. • 100% flexibility for 5 h - reducing thermal comfort in entire house to 16 °C. • 100% flexibility for 5 h - only heating a well insulated room to 17.5 °C.