Data-Driven Modelling and Optimal Control of Domestic Electric Water Heaters for Demand Response

Abstract

Electric water heater (EWH) is widely used to provide reliable and long-lasting domestic hot water to occupants in residential buildings. EWH has been widely recognized as an important source of building energy flexibility, which could benefit both the building occupants and the power system operators through various demand response (DR) programs. DR programs applied to EWHs are investigated in this paper. Optimal control strategies are developed to operate a portfolio of EWHs in order to reduce energy costs. A control-based model of EWH is developed using the data from field experiments and a statistical grey-box modelling approach (here using the CSTM-R package). The results show that the aggregated EWHs can optimize their heating schedule in order to reduce the overall cost without compromising the comfort of occupants.