Analysis of the Grid Impact of a new Sector-Coupled Control Strategy with Power-to-Heat Systems in a Hardware-in-the-Loop Experiment

The planning of climate-neutral heating grids until 2045 propagates the increase in power-to-heat technologies. To coor-dinate such units in a cost-efficient and grid-friendly manner, a novel intelligent district heating grid control strategy was developed in the "EnEff:Wärme:HybridBOT_FW" (grant no. 03EN3041) project. Before this control strategy can be implemented in an actual field test in the city of Neuburg an der Donau, its performance and grid impact are evaluated on an innovative real-time Hardware-in-the-Loop setup, with actual power-to-heat hardware and simulated heat- and power grids. Results from a 19-hour testing period showed, that the hardware components successfully adopted the district con-troller’s set points within mostly acceptable time delays, while the power grid simulation showed a corresponding voltage response. Because temperature and mass flow of the lab’s components mainly depended on uncontrolled primary supply conditions, no significant effect of the district controller on the heat grid temperature could be observed.