Ground Source Heat Pump Modeling and Aggregation for Services Provision in Electricity Markets

Thermal load systems may be capable of participating in energy markets through load aggregators to optimize its load demand, but it could also provide other ancillary services, such as load shifting, on-peak load demand reduction, and provision of Demand Response (DR) services. A thermal load aggregation approach to minimize the aggregator’s energy procurement cost is proposed in this paper, together with a mathematical model based on the thermal load, particularly Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP), characteristics to optimize the electricity usage by end-users, while considering household thermal comfort. Simulations of an aggregator’s optimal heating load dispatch with a conventional Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and proposed GSHP alternative are presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed twostage strategy for optimal aggregator load dispatch of HVAC and GSHP systems, and the advantages of GSHP compared to HVAC.