Impact of Boundary Conditions on the Performance Enhancement of Advanced Control Strategies for a Residential Building with a Heat Pump and PV System with Energy Storage

Operational control strategies for the heating system of a single-family house with exhaust air heat pump and photovoltaic system and “smart” utilization of energy storage have been developed and evaluated in a simulation study. The main aim and novelty of this study is to evaluate the impact on the benefit of these advanced control strategies in terms of performance (energy use and economic) for a wide range of boundary conditions (country/climate, occupancy and appliance loads). Short-term weather data and historic price data for the same year as well as stochastic occupancy profiles that include the domestic hot water load are used as boundary for a parametric simulation study for the system modeled in detail in TRNSYS 17. Results show that the control using a forecast of dynamic electricity price leads to greater final energy savings than those due to the control using thermal storage for excess PV production in all of the examined locations except Sweden. The impact on self-consumption using thermal storage of heat produced by the heat pump using excess PV production is found to decrease linearly with increasing household electricity for all locations. A reduction in final energy of up to 842 kWh year−1 can be achieved just by the use of these algorithms. The net energy cost for the end-user follows the same trend as for final energy and can result in cost savings up to 175 € year−1 in Germany and Spain due to the use of the advanced control