Matthias Strobbe - imec/EnergyVille (Academia) & Polychronis Symeonidis - domX IoT Technologies (Industry)

Flexibility services play a critical role in creating a more efficient, reliable, and sustainable energy system. They help balancing the supply and demand of different energy vectors, such as electricity, natural gas and heat. The ability to automatically control the demand of flexible loads can aid in reducing the stress on the grid, integrating more renewables and lowering required energy infrastructure investments.

Flexibility services for natural gas are less known than for electricity and focus more on reducing peak demand than on the real-time balance of demand and supply. The adaptive control strategy developed by domx and imec aims at adjusting the space heating demand of residential gas boilers, towards offering flexibility services, while preserving the comfort for the end users. The AI-based control strategy can effectively increase or decrease the natural gas consumption according to wholesale market prices and the participation strategy of the supplier. The proposed strategy has been successfully demonstrated in a trial with 10 pilot households during the winter of ‘22-‘23, as part of the H2020 BIGG project. A similar control strategy could also be used for electrical heatpumps/heaters to provide flexibility for electricity markets.