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Space cooling constitutes >10% of worldwide electricity consumption and is anticipated to rise swiftly due to intensified heatwaves under emerging climate change. The escalating electricity demand for cooling services will challenge already stressed power grids, especially during peak times of demand. To address this, the adoption of demand response to adjust building energy use on the end-user side becomes increasingly important to adapt future smart buildings with rapidly growing renewable energy sources. However, existing demand response strategies predominantly explore sensible cooling energy as flexible building load while neglecting latent cooling energy, which constitutes significant portions of total energy use of buildings in humid climates. Hence, this paper aims to evaluate the demand response potential by adjusting latent cooling energy through ventilation control for typical medium commercial office buildings in four representative cities across different humid climate zones, i.e., Miami, Huston, Atlanta, and New York in the United States (US). As the first step, the sensible heat ratio, defined as sensible cooling load to total building load (involving both sensible and latent load), in different humid climates are calculated. Subsequently, the strategy to adjust building latent load through ventilation control (LLVC) is explored and implemented for demand response considering the balance of energy shifting, indoor air quality, and energy cost. Results reveal that adjusting building ventilation is capable of achieving 30%–40% Heating, Ventilation, and Air-conditioning (HVAC) cooling demand flexibility during HVAC operation while among this, the latent cooling energy contributes 56% ~ 66.4% to the overall demand flexibility. This work provides a feasible way to improve electricity grid flexibility in humid climates, emphasizing the significant role of adjusting latent cooling energy in building demand response.
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A Scalable Contract Based Approach for Integrating Building Flexibility to Energy Grids
By arbitraging among consumer comfort margins, buildings energy consumption can be changed by providing flexibility to grids. To manipulate the buildings energy consumption, a new contract-based approach to for multi-zone building heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is proposed. The approach includes the real-time markets by changing buildings optimal consumption pattern based on triggers sent by the aggregator. Also to decrease the energy consumption of buildings, the user is allowed to select the time-slots and rewards are provided to the user for aggregating flexibility. The aggregator bundles flexibility from the buildings at different time-slots and sells in real-time markets. The idea in aggregator's problem is to maximize aggregator's profits by selling flexibility in real-time markets (RTM) while ensuring the provisioning of flexibility from the buildings through incentives. To address this problem, we formulate it as a distributed optimization problem and then provide a method to solve it which provides good scalability, a requirement for large commercial buildings with multiple zones to participate in RTM. We illustrate the scalability and performance of the contract-based approach and solution technique in a building with 200 zones. Also, user participation based on their time-preferences is included in the proposed optimization. Finally, a scalable technique is shown which can be adopted in existing building automation systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1646612
- PAR ID:
- 10213776
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 18th European Control Conference (ECC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2394-2399
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.23919/ECC.2019.8796173
