Power-to-Heat: Opportunities in Reserve Market Participation for Flexible Chemical Production

The potential of Power-to-Heat in combination with flexible operation is evaluated for the medium-temperature heat-driven chemical industry. The investigation is conducted on a representative process, the ethylene glycol production. Using a rigorous dynamic model the fulfillment of minimum requirements for dynamic operability of the production plant is validated for participation in todays tertiary reserve energy market. This dynamic model is then simplified and used in a mixed-integer linear programming problem for a long-term analysis of the economic potential of reserve market participation. The optimization results show that revenues from the reserve market participation reduce the energy cost by 20% compared to operation without it. In comparison with classical reserve market implementations, which only use the steam generation system and do not consider flexible operation of the production plant to create reserve capacity, the combined approach is capable of generating 33% more revenues.