The strong interdependency of heat and power supply restricts the operational flexibility of combined heat and power (CHP) units, especially in cold seasons. More than that, such kind of coupling can conventionally cause massive power curtailment of renewable energy sources (RES) under stochastic heat demands. In this paper, these issues are resolved by the cooperation between the district heating network (DHN) and load-side thermal storages in a regional integrated energy system (RIES) model. In which, the DHN is formulated as an energy-storage-like (ESL) model, based on the dynamic characteristics of temperature and time delay effect of the medium within the pipeline system. The potential benefits of the proposed model, in terms of increasing the integration of RES and the total revenue of the entire system, have been demonstrated by the case studies.