Demand-side management has been demonstrated as an efficient and feasible method to unlock the flexibility on the demand side and support the flexible regulation of power systems. In integrated energy systems (IES) of buildings, through energy storage systems (ESS) and demand response methods, the utilization rate of renewable energy can be effectively improved, and the stability of the grid can be enhanced. However, the traditional energy usage methods of IES have limited responsiveness to the power system. Moreover, existing flexible energy usage strategies based on demand response rarely consider the impact of ESS in IES on energy usage strategies. Addressing the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a flexible energy usage strategy based on ESS and demand-side management. This strategy takes into account the daily energy production and consumption of IES, as well as the relationship between user load and the grid, forming a hierarchical scheduling mechanism for energy usage. To fully explore the impact of ESS capacity on flexible energy usage scheduling strategies, the scheduling role of ESS is quantified in terms of photovoltaic utilization rate, responsiveness, and overall cost. The results indicate that implementing the flexible energy scheduling strategy in the system increases the annual PV self-consumption by 35.29%. With higher ESS capacity, the PV self-consumption rate (SCR) can be maximized, improving by up to 4.07%. The system’s response capability is enhanced after adopting the scheduling strategy and improves further with increasing ESS capacity. Regarding costs, although applying this strategy leads to a rise in ESS operational loss costs during its functioning phase, the overall system costs decrease by approximately 65.13%, with a capacity-based variation of about 1.48%.
Han et al. (Wed,) studied this question.