Reduced complexity building and heat pump model to facilitate large scale deployment evaluations

To achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, the heating
sector will need to be decarbonized quickly. Heat
pumps are an ideal technology for the electrification
of distributed heating demand. To study the
effects of large-scale introduction of heat pumps in
electric energy distribution grids, it is imperative to
use detailed heat pump models. At the same time,
the controllability of the heat pump needs to be reflected
by the simulation model.
We propose a modeling paradigm, that uses
thermal demand output from a detailed building
model to build a simplified building and heat pump
model that can be employed in time-discrete simulations
with dynamic controls. The model enables
large scale deployment evaluations for heat-pumps
due to the low computational effort needed at simulation
runtime. The complex building dynamics are
decoupled from the simulation through the determination
of the building thermal demand curves.
The Building temperature is determined using
simple thermodynamic assumptions for every simulation
time step. The approach is demonstrated
for heating as well as cooling systems. Results are
validated by evaluating building temperature in the
detailed building simulation using thermal output of
the simplified heat pump simulation model as heating
and cooling system.