Improvement of energy performance employing electrical heat pump in scheduling a residential energy hub

Summary Electrification of heating and cooling of residential and commercial buildings is one of the key solutions in decreasing consumption of fossil fuels and emission of greenhouse gasses. One of the main equipments that plays an important role in this regard is the heat pump, which has the efficiency of more than 100%. In this paper, the effect of using electrical heat pump (EHP) in generation scheduling of an energy hub for supply of cooling, heating, and electrical loads of a building is investigated. Also, the effect of cooperation of EHP and co-generation system in improvement of energy performance of the energy hub is evaluated. The goal of presented mixed-integer nonlinear programming model that plans the energy hub for the next 24 h is minimization of operation costs. In order to scrutinize the role of EHP and the performance of presented model, six cases are considered for the energy hub in two sample summer and winter days in which the energy hub supplies cooling and heating loads via electricity only, fuel only and their combination. The results show that the presence of EHP whether in cooling section or heating section plays an important role in decreasing costs and fuel consumption. Furthermore, operation work points of co-generation system and variations of the combined heat and power operation scheme with the presence of EHP in the energy hub are precisely investigated. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.