Energy analysis of technologies to reduce electricity demand for heating in UK residential buildings

Residential buildings are among the largest consumers of electricity in the United Kingdom, with heat pumps representing a significant portion of this demand for space heating and domestic hot water. To encourage more flexible electricity usage, time-of-use (ToU) tariffs have been implemented, allowing consumers to adjust their energy consumption in response to daily fluctuations in electricity prices. Nevertheless, peak demand, which occurs during a limited number of hours, poses substantial challenges to the overall power balance and stability of the grid. As a result, there is increasing interest in deploying demand-side management (DSM) technologies to mitigate peak electricity demand for heating purposes. In this study, the effects of several DSM configurations were evaluated under cold climatic conditions, including photovoltaic panels paired with battery energy storage (PV–BESS, Case 1), PV–BESS combined with a solar thermal system (Case 2), and photovoltaic/thermal panels integrated with BESS (PV/T–BESS, Case 3). A simulation model of a typical UK residence, the David Wilson home, was developed in DesignBuilder/EnergyPlus to represent these scenarios and benchmark them against a baseline air-source heat pump setup (Case 0). For the winter month of January, simulations indicated that the heating-related electricity demand without any integrated technologies (Case 0) was 1531.6 kWh. This demand decreased to 1456.1 kWh in Case 1, 1318 kWh in Case 2, and 1132.47 kWh in Case 3. Among the configurations studied, the PV/T–BESS (Case 3) provided the largest reductions in both peak and total electricity demand, owing to its combined generation of electrical and thermal energy.