Understanding the Role of Thermal Energy Storage Location in the Optimal Performance and Operation of a District Cooling Network

The need to handle cooling loads more efficiently from geographically near locations has brought attention to the use of district cooling networks. District cooling networks can provide significant energy and economic benefits but only if designed and operated correctly. The location of thermal energy storage (TES) can impact both the operation and performance of the system. We formulate an optimization framework for a simplified cooling network for which we solve for the optimal TES location and system open loop control that reduces the 2-norm of the chiller energy consumption, serving as a surrogate for flattening the energy demand. The benefit of considering storage location is captured using the centrality of the TES in the network. The centrality metric allows us to present the benefit of reducing the centrality of the storage in the optimization objective. It shows that there exists a coupling between the optimal storage location, system operation, and power consumption objective.