Retrofitting Buildings into Thermal Batteries for Demand-Side Flexibility and Thermal Safety during Power Outages in Winter

Decarbonizing heating in buildings is a key part of climate change mitigation policies, but deep retrofit is progressing slowly, e.g., at a pace of 0.2%/y of the building stock in Europe. By means of tests in two flats of a multiapartment housing complex recently renovated to very low values of energy needs, this paper explores the role of deep retrofitted buildings in providing energy flexibility services for the occupants/owners/managers and for the energy system. Key to this flexibility increase and capacity savings is the large reduction of energy needs for heating via a high level of external insulation, which allows the thermal capacity of the building mass to act as an energy storage, without the large energy losses presently affecting a large part of the building stock. Due to the limited number of case studies reporting experimental applications in real buildings, this research aims to offer an analysis based on a series of tests and detailed monitoring which show a significant increase in the time interval during which the low-energy-needs building remains in the comfort range, compared to a high-energy-needs building, when active delivery of energy is deactivated during the heating season. Intermittent renewable energy might hence be stored when available, thus enhancing the ability of the energy system to manage inherent variability of some renewable energy sources and/or increasing the share of the self-consumption of locally generated RES energy. Besides, two unplanned heating power outages which have involved the entire building complex allowed us to verify that deep retrofitted buildings are able to maintain thermally safe indoor conditions under extreme events, such as a power outage, for at least 5 days.