An auction-based smart district heating grid

A district heating grid is a hot water pipeline grid used to transmit waste heat from CHP (Combined Heat and Power) production plants to buildings, where it is used for service water and space heating. Currently, broad use of district heating is limited to Northern Europe and some regions in Central Europe, but the European Union Energy Efficiency Directive 2012/27/EU and Energy Performance of Buildings Directive 2010/31/EU drive the widespread adoption of this technology in member states. Further, these directives push the introduction of significant renewable local energy production into these grids, creating a need for a smart district heating grid that is in many ways analogous to the smart electric grid. One major difference is that in a hot water pipeline grid, there are significant delays in energy propagation, so algorithms developed for the smart electric grid are not directly applicable. In this paper, an auction based heat trade mechanism is proposed between an auctioneer agent representing the CHP plant operator and prosumer agents representing end users with local solar thermal generation capacity. A predictive simulation is used by an auctioneer to account for the said delays in energy production and to determine the market price that best satisfies the performance indicators defined by the CHP plant operator. The proposed multi-agent system is demonstrated by co-simulating it against a model of a part of a Finnish municipality's district heating grid.