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Electrification of residential heating demand of buildings has a game-changing impact on decreasing energyrelated carbon emissions. However, the increased electrical demand also causes stress on the distribution grids in many ways including increased incidence of under voltage as well as grid congestion and introduction of new demand peaks. A single building's heat pump hot water system, consisting of a heat pump and a storage vessel, often has a sporadic profile of energy demand and is therefore unable to provide sufficient flexibility to address these issues. However, these issues can often be addressed using clusters of heat pump hot water systems that exist behind the same feeder. This paper proposes a bottom-up approach, using the individual hot water energy demand of each building in the cluster, which can be used to quantify available energy flexibility (both as upwards and downwards regulation) as a function of cluster size and type of controller. Both of these factors have significant, but different, impact on the amount and direction of flexibility that can be offered. Moreover, they also greatly influence the flexibility longevity (i.e duration for which energy flexibility could be sustained to be used later), which also depends indirectly on user comfort. Finally, the paper also presents a novel method to decide the flexibility trajectory (a term that collectively refers to flexibility potential and flexibility longevity) of a cluster of buildings and achieve a desired flexibility potential from them.

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