Special attention was devoted to thermal distribution grid design. To ensure the possibility of application in medium-large districts, composed of several buildings including energy users, generators or both, an innovative layout based on two ring pipes was examined. Thermal storage devices were also included in order to have a complete hardware platform suitable for assessing the performance of different management tools.
The test presented in this paper was carried out with both the mGT and the ICE connected to this innovative thermal grid, while users were emulated by means of fan coolers controlled by inverters. During this test the plant is controlled by a real-time model capable of calculating a machine performance ranking, which is necessary in order to split power demands between the prime movers (marginal cost decrease objective). A complete optimization tool devised by TPG (ECoMP program) was also used in order to obtain theoretical results considering the same machines and load values. The data obtained with ECoMP were compared with the experimental results to obtain a broad validation of the optimization tool.