Experimental Analysis of Cost Optimization for Electrical Floor Heating Systems in Volatile Energy Markets

This paper presents the calculations and results of applying Model Predictive Control (MPC) based optimization to electrical floor heaters under dynamic day ahead electricity prices and user set temperature restrictions. The aim of this paper is to find what effect does MPC optimization have to the expenditure costs of direct electric floor heating systems. MPC is optimized according to the dynamic electricity prices and user temperature restrictions. This means that power consumption is shifted off from peak price hours to low price hours while taking into account all the restrictions, including user comfort. Data collected from different heating systems is used to run simulations for heating scenarios, including base scenario and optimized scenario. The obtained results were compared and total cost savings in a year are calculated.