Balancing Electricity Consumption and User Comfort in Load Management of Electric Tank Water Heaters

DOI

10.2991/csit-19.2019.7How to use a DOI?

Keywords

water heaters, electrical load management, control algorithms, optimization, energy savings, user comfort

Abstract

In load management programs, electricity providers can reward their customer customers financially in return for the gained flexibility to reduce their loads at certain times on demand. In particular in residential sector, the question of whether or not to modify the energy consumption profile and how is highly challenging for an end-consumer due to difficulties in estimating the impacts on comfort of occupants. Therefore, it is essential for consumers to have means for estimation of the potential impact of load reduction on their comfort before the load reduction. We previously proposed an energy-comfort balancing model for electric tank water heaters (WHs) that can be used by residents upfront load reduction to estimate and fairly align their energy consumption for water heating to the desired level of thermal comfort. Unfortunately, that model provided solutions that were only nearly optimal. The model operated on a discrete temperature scale and thus suffered from rounding errors that accumulated with time. This paper presents a new model for energy-comfort balancing of WHs. Unlike the old model, the proposed model works on the temperature scale represented by an infinite set of real numbers. Thus, the model lacks errors resulting from the temperature discretization. The simulation results show that the refined model allows for higher energy savings due to the reduced stand-by heat losses of the WH as compared to the old model.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Alexander Belov
AU  - Vadim Kartak
AU  - Nirvana Meratnia
AU  - Paul J. M. Havinga
PY  - 2019/12
DA  - 2019/12
TI  - Balancing Electricity Consumption and User Comfort in Load Management of Electric Tank Water Heaters
BT  - Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Computer Science and Information Technologies (CSIT 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 38
EP  - 44
SN  - 2589-4900
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/csit-19.2019.7
DO  - 10.2991/csit-19.2019.7
ID  - Belov2019/12
ER  -