Smart Heat: Aggregating renewable-electric-heating-thermal-storage systems for grid services

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The overall objective of our study is to test the hypothesis that an aggregated population of smart-heat systems with advanced control can provide high quality grid services while maintaining thermal comfort. Smart-heat systems are defined as controllable, efficient electric heating equipment (e.g., heat pumps) with thermal storage. The social context of the proposed work is that 40% of the US population live in regions requiring intensive space heating, and vast majority of the space heating relies on fossil fuels. Renewable electricity-driven heating systems can potentially serve as a sustainable solution. However, large penetration of electric heating systems will have severe impacts on the power systems such as elevated peak demand. The research team will create a hierarchal control architecture for smart-heat aggregation, and test the hypothesis by demonstrating the feasibility of smart-heat aggregation. In collaboration with several local initiatives, the research team will create a smart-home virtual testbed, taking advantage of high-fidelity and reduced-order modeling techniques and real-world community energy systems monitoring.Intellectual Merit: We foresee that our research will result in a new control platform to explicitly optimize heating control to maintain thermal comfort and provide grid services. The proposed hierarchal control architecture and model-predictively-controlled load (MPCL) concept will advance our fundamental understanding in stochastic optimization, and will also unite smart grid and smart building research communities. Broader Impacts: The results from this study will raise public awareness of two important issues, i.e., the linkage of renewable energy with electric heating in mitigating the impacts of climate change, and the values of thermal storage in renewable heat. The research team will work closely with community organizations to communicate the research findings with general public through community meetings, newsletters, websites, and social media. Together with electric vehicles, the smart-heat concept has the potential to transform and unify our energy systems around electricity. The closely integrated education plan will bring more under-representative minority (URM) students into the fields of sustainable energy systems, built on PI's previous success in recruiting and mentoring URM students.