Concepts and Representations to Analyse the Grid Services Provided by Electrical Systems and Buildings

The increasingly higher energy system integration requires the formulation of multi-energy system representations that account for the interactions among electrical and thermal phenomena, satisfying technical and comfort constraints. The traditional models for analysing electrical and thermal systems have been developed independently, also because of the different time scales involved in the related phenomena. Thermal systems and buildings are becoming possible contributors of services to the electrical grid, mainly owing to energy shifting. Therefore, the role of the thermal side in providing grid services has to be appropriately established. This paper recalls the types of analyses carried out for an electrical grid, shows the differences with respect to the analyses of thermal systems, and highlights the representation of the thermal phenomena associated with the buildings in the models used to study the provision of grid services.