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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

SIMSTOR, a cost-allocation model for assessing electric-heating and -cooling technologies

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/6882599· OSTI ID:6882599
The simulation code SIMSTOR is an analytical tool that can be used to assess the impact of alternative residential heating and cooling technologies on electric-utility generation, transmission, and distribution systems. Given input information such as plant capacity, forced outage rates, scheduled-maintenance requirements, and economic data for individual generating units, the program uses hourly utility load data together with synoptic weather data to simulate system loads and costs for specified levels of heating- and cooling-technology penetration. Originally designed to study the impact of shifting on-peak demand to off-peak periods through the use of customer-owned thermal storage, the program has been extended to handle a variety of heating and cooling technologies as well as utility-side storage. The program performs five categories of calculations: (1) simulation of residential load, (2) aggregation and propagation of loads through the distribution and transmission subsystems, (3) economic dispatch of generating units, (4) scheduling of plant maintenance, and (5) calculation of economically optimal generating-plant mix. The computer running time for a full set of calculations is short, allowing many system alternatives to be examined at low cost. This report contains a description of the code, a list of input requirements, and the output of a sample run.
Research Organization:
Argonne National Lab., IL (USA)
DOE Contract Number:
W-31109-ENG-38
OSTI ID:
6882599
Report Number(s):
ANL/SPG-5
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English