December 12, 2018
4:30 p.m.
Euler Building, room 002
Predictive Dispatch and Demand Response for Commercial Buildings
Colin Jones, EPFL
Commercial buildings have significant flexibility in how and when they consume energy, and this freedom can be put to good use by grid operators managing the stability of the grid. This talk will discuss demand response for buildings, or the throttling of power consumption in reaction to signals sent by the grid operator. By shifting energy consumption in time, these techniques can be seen as utilizing the thermal inertia of buildings as a form of virtual electrical storage. In the first part of the talk, we will introduce and analyse a hybrid storage system that combines the best properties of electrical batteries, commercial buildings and generation re-scheduling to better provide balancing services at multiple time scales. We will then demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control framework via a set of 12 full day experimental results on the 20kV distribution feeder of the EPFL campus that is comprised of: a set of five uncontrollable office buildings (350kWp) and a roof-top PV installation (90kWp), and a set of controllable resources: a grid-connected BESS (720kVA-500kWh), and a small occupied office building (45 kWp).