Research Article

Integration between electric heat pump and PV system to increase self-consumption of an office application

Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università Degli Studi Del Sannio, Piazza Roma 21, Benevento, Italy

^* e-mail: carlo.roselli@unisannio.it

Received: 28 February 2017
Received in final form: 10 July 2017
Accepted: 27 July 2017

Abstract

The paper examines a solar electric driven heat pump serving an office building located in southern Italy. To satisfy space heating and cooling demand a heat pump activated by electric energy available from solar photovoltaic plant is here considered. In order to improve the self-consumption of electricity available from photovoltaic system different configurations were considered introducing an electric storage and an electric vehicle. Dynamic simulations to evaluate energy performance of the system varying photovoltaic peak power (4.5–7.5 kW) have been carried out. The proposed system achieves a fossil fuel primary energy saving up to about 96% in comparison to the reference conventional system based on a natural gas fired boiler, an electric chiller and the national electric grid. The results show that fossil fuel primary energy saving is higher when there are no storage battery and electric vehicle.