Demand side management analysis of a supermarket integrated HVAC, refrigeration and water loop heat pump system

Supermarkets are intensive energy consumers because of a high electricity demand, mainly due to refrigeration utilities. Thus, in this work a supermarket integrated HVAC, refrigeration and water loop heat pump (WLHP) system was analyzed according to a demand side management approach, adopting a demand response strategy coupled with real-time pricing predictive rule based controls. The system was modeled with TRNSYS and several DR strategies were applied to both the space heating/cooling and the WLHP to determine the plant configuration with the most effective electricity cost saving. It was found that two setups guarantee the highest economic savings. The first consists of a predictive rule based control applied to the space heating/cooling only, which is basically inexpensive and allows an annual cost saving of 4.06% respect to the baseline configuration. The second, instead, combines predictive rule based controls applied to both the space heating/cooling and the WLHP auxiliary heater, and shows the best performance with the adoption of a 200 m3 water-based thermal energy storage. Respect to the baseline, this configuration provides an annual cost saving of 4.67%.