A Power-Based Model of a Heating Station for District Heating (DH) System Applications

District Heating (DH) systems are often seen as a good practical approach to meet the local heat demand of the districts due to its ability to provide affordable and low carbon energy to the consumers. Yet, under today’s regulations to renovate the buildings into more energy-efficient ones, the local heat demand is decreasing. Therefore, the operation of DH systems is also affected by the changing heat demand profile, which might lead to less profit for the operators of DH systems. Thus, the operators of DH systems strive for an optimal operation at which the heat demand is met and the profits are maximized. Due to the fact that these systems are complex-physical systems, therefore it is difficult to conduct any experimental investigation on them in order to examine the optimal operation. Accordingly, it is crucial to create fundamental models to investigate the optimal operation of such systems. In this paper, a power-based model is built to represent the heating station as part of a DH system. Then, the model is validated using real data from an existing heating station in Freiburg, Germany. The validation results reveal that the goodness-of-fit for the model is held to be good enough to test it for operational optimization cases.