Electric underfloor heating is a long-term proven technology with exceptionally long service life and a profitable investment/utility value. Due to the consumption of real energy and operating costs, this means of heating is today amongst the preferred ones by customers. The revision of the Energy Performance of Building Directive (EPBD) might however change their perspective.
The buildings sector has face tremendous changes in the past years to reduce its climate impact. There has been a fundamental reduction in energy demand, not only in the virtual world of primary energy, but also in terms of actual energy consumption. This change, especially for smaller buildings such as family houses, pushed for more flexibility in the regulation for heating system.
A considerable advantage of today’s electric underfloor systems is precisely their flexibility, as well as their easy, specific and cheap performance regulation. Contrarily, the energy efficiency of ordinary buildings, expressed in real energy consumption, exceeded hydronic systems by about 25%, while in modern Nearly zero-emission building (nZEBs), this value can go up to 60%. The reason for this is the ability of electric underfloor heating to react to so-called “random heat gains” during operation.
However, one identified disadvantage of electric underfloor heating remains their accompanying property, ensuring low levels of consumption on the one hand, while, on the other, allowing for the latter to enter directly into the consumption of electricity from the distribution network, and lead to a possible uncontrolled load on the energy system. This disadvantage is now completely eliminated thanks to more frequently used technological elements of energy management, such as PV covering a significant part of their own energy consumption and battery storage, ensuring the collection and possibly also the sale of energy at the most favorable times on the SPOT market.
While revising the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), the European Commission proposes to introduce the concept of so-called Primary Energy Factor (PEF) as a decisive factor of energy efficiency in buildings only, as it does not apply for other sectors such as electromobility. With this Primary Energy Factor, electrical energy would be completely selectively burdened with high coefficients affecting precisely and only its use.
Given that the price on the SPOT market directly depends on the level of energy supply and demand, and a higher price always means greater tension in the energy system, this very behavior of smart buildings leads to balancing the distribution system from below, to increasing its permeability and to reducing the need for backup resources.
The use of direct electric heating systems together with energy management technologies in these buildings, from single-family homes to industrial premises, brings a whole host of other benefits:
- The only source of energy is electrical energy, entailing unrivaled, easy and accurate control of total consumption, which does not have to correspond to consumption from the distribution systemthough it can contribute to its balancing already at the micro level;
- The possibility of repeated short switching of consumption necessary for its accuratebalancing is in direct contrast to hot water systems, where, on the other hand, operating the heat source in this way would be the reason for a significant shortening of its service
The project described above was entirely developed in cooperation with leading scientific workplaces, and, today, it is applied with demonstrable and independently verified results at the level of family houses, apartment buildings, service facilities and production plants.
The use of this energy management system gives users the benefits of pre-crisis electricity prices, therefore making this system attractive to a wide range of customers!
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