Flexible heat pumps in clusters of buildings: energy flexibility quantification of space cooling loads

The energy demand for building cooling has experienced a significant growth in the past years, with significant implications for power grids. Consequently, building cooling flexible energy demand management is a good instrument to provide grid stability and favour integration of Renewable Energy Sources. By using reversible heat pump systems to provide cooling loads, energy flexibility can be provided to the grid, that, in case of widespread installations, can be activated as reserves. This is especially relevant giving the increasing share on the market of heat pumps. However, quantifying the energy flexibility that heat pumps in clusters of buildings can provide is still very difficult. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate the response of a cluster of buildings representative of the Italian building stock to different peak-shaving strategies. For this purpose, a tool developed by the authors was implemented to assess the flexible characteristics of the space cooling systems.