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This article is devoted to the assessment of the maximum allowable capacity of a heat pump unit (HPU), which can be integrated in a technological scheme, conditional upon a break-even operation in the electricity market for a number of existing thermal power plants (TPP) of Territorial Generating Company No. 1 (TGC-1). For the considered power plants, values of the maximum allowable capacity of a HPU were calculated for a period of 1 month. The most beneficial combine heat power plants (CHPPs) in terms of the methodology used in the study were the CHPP-22 and the CHPP-5. With a HPU’s energy conversion coefficient (ECC) equal to 5, the average maximum allowable capacity for the CHPP-22 was 689.1 MW, and for the CHPP-5 – 711.6 MW. An assessment is given and the influence of the technical and economic indicators of stations on the formation of the final value of a heat pump’s capacity is illustrated by the example of the CHPP-5. It is shown that when assessing and choosing the capacity of a heat pump for a real thermal power plant, it is necessary to take into account the complex of such technical and economic indicators of the operation of this station as: the amount of electricity supplied, the wholesale electricity market (WEM) weighted average cost of electricity supplied and the specific consumption of the reference fuel for electricity supply.

This work is devoted to considering the possibility of applying simulation methods to assess the effectiveness of the joint integration and operation of methane steam reforming units and heat pumps at facilities of the energy sector. During this study, simulation models of the thermal circuit of the Petrozavodsk combined heat and power plant were created in its original form and with a methane steam reforming unit and a heat pump included. The basic model was verified. Output characteristics of the models without and with additional units were compared. The use of a methane steam reforming unit with a capacity of 75 thousand nm3/h, provided that electricity and heat supply from the plant to external consumers is constant, leads to an increase in fuel costs from 50.2 % to 56.2 %, depending on the extracted steam mass flow rate. To assess the influence of the selected circuit design it was proposed to calculate the fuel heat utilization factor, taking into account the generation of a new technological product – hydrogen. The proposed circuit design leads to a decrease in the fuel heat utilization coefficient by at least 2.94 %. The use of a heat pump for heating gas before the steam reforming unit does not affect the operating modes of the plant.