The management of electricity grids requires the supply and demand of electricity to be in balance at any point in time. To this end, electricity suppliers have to nominate their electricity bids on the day-ahead electricity market such that the forecasted supply and demand are in balance. One way to reduce the cost of electricity supply is to minimize the procurement costs of electricity by shifting flexible loads from peak to off-peak hours. This can be done by offering consumers time-of-use (ToU) variable electricity tariffs as an incentive to shift their demand. Smart control of HVAC equipment with embedded model predictive control (MPC) can be used in that context. They have to be provided with dynamic building simulation models. This study provides typologies of Smart Grid Energy ready Buildings within the context of the Belgian building stock and the Belgian day-ahead electricity market. A typical new residential building is considered, equipped with an air-to-water heat pump that supplies either radiators or a floor heating system. Five heating control strategies are compared in terms of thermal comfort, energy use and flexibility, where the flexibility is quantified in terms of load volumes shifted and in terms of procurement costs avoided. The first three are rule-based control strategies, whereas the latter two are 'smart-grid' model predictive control strategies responding to a time-varying electricity price profile. The results show that the 'smart-grid' control strategies allow to reduce the procurement costs by 2 to 18% and increase the flexibility by 8 to 24% (volume shifted) with the same thermal comfort. The impact of building insulation level and thermal mass is also evaluated. The flexibility for load shifting is about 8 to 10% higher when shifting from a low-energy (K45) to a very-low-energy house (K30).
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