Combined heat and power scheduling: Utilizing building‐level thermal inertia for short‐term thermal energy storage in district heat system

A major limitation to integrating wind power in electric power system (EPS) is the massive generation capacity of the high‐penetration inflexible combined heat and power (CHP) units in district heating system (DHS). A heat and power optimal dispatch is established in this study to exploit building‐level thermal inertia as a form of short‐term thermal energy storage (TES) to unlock the flexibility of CHP units. This proposed short‐term building TES can provide storage potential by utilizing small variations in indoor temperature under the proposed dispatch control model to control the storage capacity in the dispatch process. A linear optimization operational model is run to integrate energy systems by balancing heat and power demands over multiple time periods with CHP units, wind power, short‐term building TES, and district‐level heating network (DHN) storage capacity. A two‐stage decomposition–coordination iteration algorithm is proposed to solve this optimization program. The simulation results are analyzed to determine the potential benefits of this short‐term TES in terms of economics, wind power integration, and the flexibility of CHP units. © 2018 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.