Characterization of Aggregated Building Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Load as a Flexibility Service Using Gray‐Box Modeling

Integrating large amounts of volatile renewable power into the electricity grid requires ancillary services (ASs) from multiple providers including flexible demand. These should be comparable by uniform and efficiently evaluable performance criteria. The objective is to characterize the technical flexibility of aggregated building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) under different operating conditions. New bounds of flexible power and holding durations, accordingly pay-back power and recovery times, and ramping rates are derived, using a new gray-box model of stochastically actuated aggregations of thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) that can serve as well for load control. New closed formulas of the expected switching temperatures are derived using survival processes and hazard functions. This ex-ante characterization enables fast decision tools for AS feasibility testing and planning by demand aggregators, as it neither relies on simulation or optimization, nor on the identification and clustering of unit-level parameters. The estimates are explored in a sensitivity study of urban-level heat pump heating with respect to six key input factors. A case study using dynamic regulation signals from Pennsylvania–New Jersey–Maryland (PJM) demonstrates the benefit, in terms of tracking precision, of the refined energy measures over pure energy or power capacity bounds

Bidding strategy for a virtual power plant for trading energy in the wholesale electricity market

Virtual power plants (VPPs) are an effective way to increase renewable integration. In this PhD research, the concept design and the detailed costs and benefits of implementing a realistic VPP in Western Australia (WA), comprising 67 dwellings, are developed. The VPP is designed to integrate and coordinate an 810kW rooftop solar PV farm, 350kW/700kWh vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFB), heat pump hot water systems (HWSs), and smart appliances through demand management mechanisms. This research develops a robust bidding strategy for the VPP to participate in both load following ancillary service (LFAS) and energy market in the wholesale electricity market in WA considering the uncertainties associated with PV generation and electricity market prices. Using this strategy, the payback period can be improved by 3 years (to a payback period of 6 years) and the internal rate of return (IRR) by 7.5% (to an IRR of 18%) by participating in both markets. The daily average error of the proposed robust method is 2.7% over one year when compared with a robust mathematical method. The computational effort is 0.66 sec for 365 runs for the proposed method compared to 947.10 sec for the robust mathematical method. To engage customers in the demand management schemes by the VPP owner, the gamified approach is adopted to make the exercise enjoyable while not compromising their comfort levels. Seven gamified applications are examined using a developed methodology based on Kim’s model and Fogg’s model, and the most suitable one is determined. The simulation results show that gamification can improve the payback period by 1 to 2 months for the VPP owner. Furthermore, an efficient and fog-based monitoring and control platform is proposed for the VPP to be flexible, scalable, secure, and cost-effective to realise the full capabilities and profitability of the VPP

Energy Efficiency: Opportunities, Challenges, and Potential Solutions

Energy efficiency undertakings create cost savings and public benefits. These cost savings provide owners/managers with opportunities to earn a return on their investments. Benefits include lower electricity congestion, lower emissions, and potentially lower prices. However, there are many cases in which viable projects are known but not pursued. This research seeks to asses the role of capital markets in driving investment into non-residential building energy efficiency. Research Questions: What are the demand-side and supply-side measures that could save the most energy at the least cost? What are the impediments to investment in these measures? What are potential solutions, particularly in terms of financial instruments, products, and structures? Methodology: Secondary research In-depth interviews Conferences / trade shows Findings: Investment in non-residential building energy efficiency is taking place but not to the extent possible. When projects do attract customer attention, access to capital is a significant issue, not least because of the difficulty in collateralizing EE equipment, and most ESCOs’ lack of credit ratings. Utilities are looking to establish authoritative and lucrative positions, driven by new regulation. Capital markets financiers can seize this opportunity to leverage utilities and government partners to devise financing structures that can reallocate risk and return and drive investment into non-residential building energy efficiency.Master of ScienceSchool of Natural Resources and EnvironmentUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62084/1/AparnaSundaram-FinancingEnergyEfficiency-FINAL.do

Integration of Methodologies for the Evaluation of Offer Curves in Energy and Capacity Markets through Energy Efficiency and demand Response

[EN] The objectives of improving the efficiency, and integration, of renewable sources by 2030-2050 are complex in practice and should be linked to an increase of demand-side flexibility. The main challenges to achieving this flexibility are the lack of incentives and an adequate framework. For instance, customers' revenue is usually low, the volatility of prices is high and there is not any practical feedback to customers from smart meters. The possibility of increasing customer revenue could reduce the uncertainty with respect to economic concerns, improving investments in efficiency, enabling technology and thus, engaging more customers in these policies. This objective could be achieved by the participation of customers in several markets. Moreover, Demand Response and Energy Efficiency can share ICT technologies but this participation needs to perform an aggregation of demand. The idea of this paper is to present some methodologies for facilitating the definition and evaluation of energy versus cost curves; and subsequently to estimate potential revenues due to Demand Response. This can be accomplished by models that estimate: demand and energy aggregation; economic opportunities and benefits; impacts on customer convenience; customer feedback and price analysis. By doing so, we would have comprehensive information that can help customers and aggregators to define energy packages and their monetary value with the objective of fostering their market participation.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad (Spanish Government) under research projects ENE2015-70032-REDT, ENE-2016-78509-C3-1-P&2-P and EU FEDER funds. Authors have also received funds from these grants for covering the costs to publish in open access.Gabaldón, A.; Álvarez, C.; Ruiz-Abellón, M.; Guillamón, A.; Valero-Verdú, S.; Molina, R.; Garcia-Garre, A. (2018). Integration of Methodologies for the Evaluation of Offer Curves in Energy and Capacity Markets through Energy Efficiency and demand Response. Sustainability. 10(2):1-27. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10020483S12710

Carbon Free Boston: Buildings Technical Report

Part of a series of reports that includes: Carbon Free Boston: Summary Report; Carbon Free Boston: Social Equity Report; Carbon Free Boston: Technical Summary; Carbon Free Boston: Transportation Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Waste Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Energy Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Offsets Technical Report; Available at http://sites.bu.edu/cfb/OVERVIEW: Boston is known for its historic iconic buildings, from the Paul Revere House in the North End, to City Hall in Government Center, to the Old South Meeting House in Downtown Crossing, to the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill, to 200 Clarendon (the Hancock Tower) in Back Bay, to Abbotsford in Roxbury. In total, there are over 86,000 buildings that comprise more than 647 million square feet of area. Most of these buildings will still be in use in 2050. Floorspace (square footage) is almost evenly split between residential and non-residential uses, but residential buildings account for nearly 80,000 (93 percent) of the 86,000 buildings. Boston’s buildings are used for a diverse range of activities that include homes, offices, hospitals, factories, laboratories, schools, public service, retail, hotels, restaurants, and convention space. Building type strongly influences energy use; for example, restaurants, hospitals, and laboratories have high energy demands compared to other commercial uses. Boston’s building stock is characterized by thousands of turn-of-the-20th century homes and a postWorld War II building boom that expanded both residential buildings and commercial space. Boston is in the midst of another boom in building construction that is transforming neighborhoods across the city. [TRUNCATED]Published versio

供給と需要側を考慮した電源システムのモデリングと評価

Modelling and optimization of sustainable power system and energy network are becoming complex engineering. Demand side resources also need to be planned considering characteristics of district energy supply scenario. This research first analyzes the feasibility of VPP based on scenario of Chongming Island. VPP focuses on expansion of renewable energy and upgrade of efficient appliances, results verify the effectiveness of the VPP concept. Then investigates the techno-economic viability of high variable renewable integration. PV-PHS dispatch scenarious are carried out with constraints, PHS effectively recovers the suppression and decreases the PV power levelized cost. Introduction PV-PHS shifts merit order curve to right, decreasing power generating cost. Thirdly, cost and environmental benefits of optimal designed decentralized energy systems were investigated. Scheduled distributed energy resources could be optimized to benefit the public grid. Performance of dynamic price is investigated based on the social demonstration project experiment. Finally, the conclusions are provided.北九州市立大

Application of heat pumps and thermal storage systems for improved control and performance of microgrids

The high penetration of renewable energy sources (RES), in particular, the rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems in power systems, causes rapid ramps in power generation to supply load during peak-load periods. Residential and commercial buildings have considerable potential for providing load exibility by exploiting energy-e_cient devices like ground source heat pump (GSHP). The proper integration of PV systems with the GSHP could reduce power demand from demand-side. This research provides a practical attempt to integrate PV systems and GSHPs e_ectively into buildings and the grid. The multi-directional approach in this work requires an optimal control strategy to reduce energy cost and provide an opportunity for power trade-o_ or feed-in in the electricity market. In this study, some optimal control models are developed to overcome both the operational and technical constraints of demand-side management (DSM) and for optimum integration of RES. This research focuses on the development of an optimal real-time thermal energy management system for smart homes to respond to DR for peak-load shifting. The intention is to manage the operation of a GSHP to produce the desired amount of thermal energy by controlling the volume and temperature of the stored water in the thermal energy storage (TES) while optimising the operation of the heat distributors to control indoor temperature. This thesis proposes a new framework for optimal sizing design and real-time operation of energy storage systems in a residential building equipped with a PV system, heat pump (HP), and thermal and electrical energy storage systems. The results of this research demonstrate to rooftop PV system owners that investment in combined TSS and battery can be more profitable as this system can minimise life cycle costs. This thesis also presents an analysis of the potential impact of residential HP systems into reserve capacity market. This research presents a business aggregate model for controlling residential HPs (RHPs) of a group of houses that energy aggregators can utilise to earn capacity credits. A control strategy is proposed based on a dynamic aggregate RHPs coupled with TES model and predicting trading intervals capacity requirements through forecasting demand and non-scheduled generation. RHPs coupled with TES are optimised to provide DSM reserve capacity. A rebound effect reduction method is proposed that reduces the peak rebound RHPs power