A Comparison of Widespread Flexible Residential Electric Heating and Energy Efficiency in a Future Nordic Power System

Abstract

Integrating ever-increasing amounts of variable renewable energy (VRE) into the power system could benefit from harnessing widespread residential demand-side management. This paper presents case studies on the potential benefits of power-to-heat (P2H) flexibility and energy efficiency improvements in a hypothetical future Finnish detached housing stock in the year 2030, both as a part of the larger Nordic power system and in an isolated Finnish power system. The housing stock was depicted using two archetype houses modeled using a simple lumped capacitance approach, integrally optimized as a part of a stochastic linear programming unit commitment model of the power system. With sufficient amounts of VRE, residential P2H with thermal storage was found to yield more system cost savings than simple energy efficiency improvements. However, energy efficiency improvements remained more beneficial for house owners, as excessive use of residential P2H for assisting the power system could result in increased heating costs.