Analysis of the Potential for Thermal Flexibility of Cooling Applications

The feed-in of electricity from renewable energies, such as wind or solar power, fluctuates based on weather conditions. This unpredictability due to volatile feed-in can lead to sudden changes in energy generation so that solutions ensuring grid stability need to be implemented. The cooling sector offers the opportunity to create flexibilities for such balancing, with this study focusing on the thermal flexibilities that can be provided by cooling applications. Various cooling-demand profiles are investigated with respect to their load profile and their impact on flexibility is analysed. In addition to the cooling demand, scenarios of different storage dimensions are considered. As a result, it shows that an increasing base-load level and increasing operating-load duration have a negative effect on flexibility, while an increasing full-load duration is beneficial for flexibility. Storage size also has a strong impact as higher storage capacity and storage performance indicate higher flexibility, whereas above a certain size they only provide little added value.