RESEARCH ARTICLE Potential use of thermal energy storage for shifting cooling and heating load to off-peak load: A case study for residential building in Canada Dogan Erdemir 1,2 | Ibrahim Dincer 2 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey 2 Clean Energy Research Laboratory, Ontario Tech University, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada Correspondence Dogan Erdemir, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey. Email: erdemir@erciyes.edu.tr Abstract This study presents an investigation of the potential use of thermal energy stor- age for shifting cooling and heating loads to off-peak hours in order to balance the electricity production and demand periods. In Canada, the main energy source for cooling and heating applications is generally electricity. Therefore, cooling and heating devices have a great impact on the electricity peak load. In this study, it is considered that heating and cooling loads on the electricity peak load periods are shifted to off-peak hours by thermal energy storage sys- tems. At the end of this study, it is observed that the thermal energy storage has great potential for shifting electricity peak load depending on cooling and heating load to off-peak periods. The electricity peak loads can be reduced by 25% and 45% by shifting heating and cooling loads to off-peak hours and doing storage. Furthermore, the thermal energy storage systems can help reduce both cooling and heating costs in Canadian dwellings by 20% and 18%, respectively. KEYWORDS cooling, cost assessment, heating, thermal energy storage 1 | INTRODUCTION Heating and cooling are considered very important pro- cesses for people's thermal comfort and so many devices are used for supplying the thermal comfort conditions. Almost half of the consumed energy around the world is used for heating and cooling residential and commercial buildings. Although many energy sources are used for the heating (fossil, solar, electricity, etc.), the energy source for cooling is generally electricity. However, espe- cially in developed countries, electricity is widely used for residential heating as the main energy source. Therefore, heating and cooling loads have a major impact on elec- tricity consumption distribution (hourly, daily, seasonal, etc.). Electricity consumption distribution in a time frame such as hourly, daily, and seasonal shows a fluctuating behavior. Because the need for energy depending on peo- ple's requirements changes during a period. Energy pro- duction distribution has also fluctuating behavior, especially in the last few decades, due to the increasing number of renewable energy plants. This situation causes an unbalance between energy demand and energy sup- ply. This imbalance causes the energy not to be used despite it is produced, and/or to invest in large power plants that will generate energy for a very short time to meet peak loads. Therefore, there are many studies in the open literature to investigate the energy consumption dis- tribution and energy production distribution. Also, some of them are presented to solving the mismatching prob- lem between energy demand and supply periods. Fumo and Biswas 1 performed a regression analysis in order to predict the residential energy consumption. They Received: 11 October 2019 Revised: 27 November 2019 Accepted: 24 December 2019 DOI: 10.1002/est2.125 Energy Storage. 2020;2:e125. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/est2 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 of 9 https://doi.org/10.1002/est2.125