Demand response (DR) is considered as a potentially effective tool to compensate generation intermittency imposed by renewable sources. Further, DR can instigate to offer optimum asset utilization and to avoid or delay the need for new infrastructure investment. Being a sizable load together with high thermal time constant, heat pumps (HP) can offer a great deal of flexibility in the future intelligent grids especially to compensate fluctuating generation. However, the HP flexibility is highly dependent on thermal demand profile, namely hot water and space heating demand. This paper proposes price based scheduling followed by a demand dispatch based central control and a local voltage based adaptive control, to realize HP demand flexibility. Two-step control architecture, namely local primary control encompassed by the central coordinative control, is proposed to implement the aforementioned control techniques. Results show that HP flexibility can contribute significantly to both the local network and system level balancing.
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Bhattarai et al. (2014) studied this question.