So, what are the main takeaways?

▶️ Flexible heat pumps with thermal storage can provide valuable flexibility to the power sector.
▶️ They can reduce the need to build other flexible power plants or storage.
▶️ Hourly electricity prices are key for incentivizing optimal heat pump use.
▶️ To that end, households need to be equipped with 'smart meters' (Germany needs to speed up).
▶️ An ambitious rollout of heat pumps can significantly reduce natural gas consumption, CO2 emissions, and costs.

And for the nerds, some details on the method 🤓

* We use a linear cost-minimization model of Germany and its neighboring countries with the sexy name #DIETER.
* Different heat pump rollout scenarios until 2030 are modeled (1.7, 3, 6, and 10 million units).
* #BEV and #hydrogen demand is also included.

And some further points:

* An ambitious heat pump rollout would be best matched with additional wind power, but solar PV also works if combined with other technologies.
* We calculate that small (<2 h) heat storage makes sense economically; larger ones are too expensive and anyway unrealistic for private households and will be rather used in heating grids.

Our principal insights are:

1️⃣ If equipped with a small heat thermal storage, heat pumps can store hot water for a few hours. By doing so, they can significantly reduce their peak demand and thus reduce the need for, e.g., batteries or gas-fired power plants.

In hours of high electricity demand, neighbouring countries often also exhibit high demand (B). On the contrary, PV feed-in is often low in high-demand hours (A). Wind, on the other hand, is much more heterogeneous.

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But what are now the results?

It's mainly wind power: differences in profiles explain around 80% of the drop in storage energy and power.

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We also find this effect in our analysis. In our setting, with 12 #European countries in a 100%-#renewable energy #scenario, allowing for exchange between countries leads to a drop of 30% for long-duration #storage.

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