Decentralized temperature and storage volume control in multi-producer district heating

Abstract: Modern district heating technologies have a great potential to make the energy sector more flexible and sustainable due to their capabilities to use energy sources of varied nature and to efficiently store energy for subsequent use. Central control tasks within these systems for the efficient and safe distribution of heat refer to the stabilization of overall system temperatures and the regulation of storage units state of charge. These are challenging goals when the networked and nonlinear nature of district heating system models is taken into consideration. In this letter, for district heating systems with multiple, distributed heat producers, we propose a decentralized control scheme to provably meet said tasks stably.