Management of the part-load operation of a heat pump-based low enthalpy district heating and cooling network in a university campus with photovoltaic generation

Low-enthalpy district heating and cooling networks offer a promising pathway for integrating renewable electricity and decentralized thermal generation, particularly when coupled with high-efficiency heat pumps. This paper presents a comprehensive partial load operational optimization framework for a heat pump based low-enthalpy district heating and cooling network, combined with a photovoltaic surplus thermal load shifting strategy, in which building thermal inertia is explicitly exploited through temperature setpoint modulation to shift heat pump operation toward periods of photovoltaic surplus generation. The approach combines alternative building setpoint control strategies with a mixed-integer nonlinear programming formulation to optimally allocate thermal demand among multiple heat pumps while accounting for partial-load operation.