The Role of Heat Pumps in Energy Communities: Potential and Limits

The energy transition involves a decrease in the use of fossil fuels in favour of greater penetration of renewable energy sources. To this purpose, the most recent European Directive about renewable sources (Directives EU 2018/2001 and 2019/944) promote self-consumers and renewable energy communities. One sector where the spread of energy communities is foreseeable is that of buildings, which alone is responsible for about 40% of final energy consumption and, in this context, the use of renewable energy in HVAC plays an essential role for heating, cooling and domestic hot water preparation (systems that use most of the energy consumed by the sector). In this perspective, a fundamental role is assumed by heat pumps coupled with PV panels and storage. In this paper, in order to highlight their potential to increase the self-consumption due to HVAC systems, an analysis is presented, obtained thanks to dynamic energy simulations, for the Milan ( Italy) climate and compared with the climate of Strasbourg (France - used as the "Average" condition to estimate SCOP according to std. EN 14825). Some results about the self-consumption estimates are presented both for baseline and for communities with PV installations up to 200 kWp, showing that heat pumps (HP) combined with rulebased control strategies (RBC) allow to increase up to 10% the self-consumption of PV renewable energy generated in situ.