Abstract
The increasing share of volatile renewable energy in the electricity grid increases the importance of load flexibility and Demand Response for balancing electricity supply with demand. Flexible loads in office buildings (e.g. educational buildings) are heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. This paper focuses on ventilation systems as flexible loads for providing ancillary services to the grid. A number of studies consider ventilation system control based only on demand or discuss possibilities of improving system performance. Previous studies provide little or no information about ventilation system flexibility, e.g. amount of power modulation, the rate of change, and the duration of how long the power level can be held. The described information is required by aggregators to provide load aggregation services for transmission system operators (TSO). This paper proposes a robust and model-free approach to estimate ventilation system flexibility according to CO2 concentration in extracted air. The proposed approach includes power regulation boundaries for the ventilation system and duration estimation when operating at the selected boundary. A case study is conducted on a ventilation system, which services an auditorium of an educational building. The current paper analyzes the proposed robust approach for estimating ventilation system flexibility and compares estimation to measured results.
Highlights
By introducing distributed volatile renewable energy generation to the electricity grid the balance between electricity supply and demand is becoming difficult to maintain and predict
A case study is conducted to estimate the duration of how long forced ventilation rate (FVR) can be held until the CO2 concentration reaches its limit
A case study was conducted in one auditorium of an educational building, where air exchange was provided by one ventilation system
Summary
By introducing distributed volatile renewable energy generation to the electricity grid the balance between electricity supply and demand is becoming difficult to maintain and predict. This is the reason why Demand Response (DR) as a source for energy flexibility is becoming important to provide ancillary services to the grid to maintain system stability. In commercial buildings, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and lighting systems are the biggest energy consumers, where ventilation systems alone account up to 12% of the overall energy consumption [3]. The load flexibility of ventilation systems is dictated by indoor air quality (IAQ) as it must provide the defined minimum requirements for indoor climate at all times.
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