Abstract
Buildings consume 73% of electricity produced in the United States and, currently, they are largely passive participants in the electric grid. However, the flexibility in building loads can be exploited to provide ancillary services to enhance the grid reliability. In this paper, we investigate two control strategies that allow Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems in commercial and residential buildings to provide frequency regulation services to the grid while maintaining occupants comfort. The first optimal control strategy is based on model predictive control acting on a variable air volume HVAC system (continuously variable HVAC load), which is available in large commercial buildings. The second strategy is rule-based control acting on an aggregate of on/off HVAC systems, which are available in residential buildings in addition to many small to medium size commercial buildings. Hardware constraints that include limiting the switching between the different states for on/off HVAC units to maintain their lifetimes are considered. Simulations illustrate that the proposed control strategies provide frequency regulation to the grid, without affecting the indoor climate significantly.
Highlights
To ensure the functionality and reliability of a power grid, supply and demand must be balanced instantaneously and continuously
The control input u is the critical actuator yielding its own working properties and conditions. It takes continuous values within a certain bound for a given HVAC system in large commercial buildings, where the variable frequency drive (VFD), which is available in variable air volume (VAV)
The performance of the designed rule-based control strategy has been investigated for a 24-h period and compared with the baseline case where no regulation is considered
Summary
To ensure the functionality and reliability of a power grid, supply and demand must be balanced instantaneously and continuously. Only about 10% of all commercial buildings use automation systems to control their energy usage, and an insignificant percentage of these buildings provide ancillary services to power system operators [5]. In [14], the time scale of ancillary service from commercial building HVAC systems is extended to the range of 3 min to 1 h by using the flexibility in the power demand from chillers. One drawback of residential loads is that they are largely on/off control, which greatly reduces the flexibility of control strategies that can be applied Such a drawback will be tackled for the first time in this paper by considering a coordination and control of an aggregate of on/off loads to provide desired grid-response. Of the total HVAC power in residential/commercial buildings for regulation services to the grid, with little change in their indoor environments
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