PHYS-E0483 Advances in New Energy Technologies (Spring 2024)

Exercise 8

Submit your answer by Wednesday the 13.3.2024 at 14:15.

Address questions to indula.amarasinghe@aalto.fi

1. Demonstration

a) A region has large-scale solar power production facilities with total peak power capacity of
100 MW. The hourly solar power production data is presented in an Excel sheet available in
MyCourses. The current power grid system of the region can handle only up to 80 MW of
solar power, so if the production exceeds this, the rest of the solar power has to be cut off.
How large fraction of the annual solar electricity production is lost? What are the economic
losses? The solar energy can be sold with a constant price of 100 €/MWh.

b) The region wants to increase the solar power production. They calculate that investment costs,
if distributed equally during the life cycle of the panel, are 100 000 €/MW for each year (this
corresponds to about 66 €/MWh for the electricity produced during the life cycle). Calculate
the optimum increase percent p for the solar power in terms of maximizing the profit. How
much the profit can be increased? The electricity price and the curtailment limitation are the
same than in a-part. You don’t have to take account the inflation.

2. Home exercise

A house has an electric heating system which converts electricity to heat with efficiency η = 1. The
house owner wants to smooth the peaks in demand so that the amount of electricity taken from the
grid for heating (Pin) does not exceed 5 kW. This is done by applying a water heat storage (which
turns electricity to heat with η = 1 and uses it to heat water (mass mwater)) to the house as presented in
Figure 1. The maximum temperature (Tmax) of the water is 95 °C and minimum temperature (Tmin)
depends from the outside temperature according to formula
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𝑇𝑚𝑖𝑛 = − 𝑇𝑎𝑖𝑟 + 45℃.
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The heat loss power is Qloss = (Twater – 20)*1 W, where Twater is the temperature of the water as Celsius
degrees.

The water heat storage will be managed according to following algorithm:

- If Dheat ≤ 5 kW, the electricity needed to satisfy the heat demand is taken from the grid. The
amount of electricity used for heating the water storage (Qin) is maximized according to
constraints Pin ≤ 5 kW and Twater ≤ 95 °C.
 - If Dheat ≥ 5 kW, 5 kW of electricity is taken from the grid and the rest of the heat demand from
the water storage (Qout), if it is possible without violating the constraint Twater ≥ Tmin. If this is
not possible, all of the storage capacity of water storage is used (Twater = Tmin) and the rest of
the electricity needed is taken from the grid (constraint Pin ≤ 5 kW is broken).

Study the effect of this heat storage to electricity demand of a Finnish house from January to March
based on hourly data of outside temperature and heat demand. We provide files for two platforms: if
you prefer MATLAB, download files Ex8_matlab.m (code) and Ex8_data.txt (data, Tair and Dheat in
left and right column respectively). If you prefer Excel, download file Ex8_excel.xlsx. Fill the
necessary formulas to the file you choose and answer the following questions:

a) Calculate and plot Pin as a function of time in cases mwater = 0 kg (no heat storage), mwater =
100 kg, mwater = 500 kg, mwater = 1000 kg. The initial temperature of water is 90 °C. Comment
on your results.

b) Calculate the total amount of electricity taken from the grid (Pin) for heating in the cases
studied in a-part. Comment on your results.

c) How would you change the algorithm used for managing heat storage to decrease the energy
losses? You don’t have to do any calculations, presenting your idea and justifying why it
works is enough.

Hints: You can calculate the amount of energy needed to change the temperature of water
storage by ΔT by using the formula
𝑄 = 𝑐𝑚∆𝑇,
where c is the specific heat capacity of water (4.19 kJ/(kg°C)).

Make sure you don’t mix kilojoules (kJ) and kilowatthours (kWh). In case you have to
do unit transformations, you can use the formula 1 kWh = 3600 kJ.

Figure 1. Overview of the system.