Energy flexibility of commercial buildings for demand response applications in Australia

Abstract

Demand response (DR) is widely recognized as an important mechanism in the Australian electricity market, though large-scale uptake in commercial buildings is yet to occur, in part due to the difficulty of characterising the resource. This paper describes a bottom-up physics-based approach to characterise the DR potential of three types of commercial buildings (schools, offices, and data centres) under a global set-point temperature offset strategy. Representative models are calibrated with energy meter data and parametric analysis is used to assess sensitivity to different building, operating and system parameters. Parametric equations are provided for relative DR potentials as functions of temperature and time of day. School buildings were found to have the highest relative DR potential (∼40–45%) for ambient temperatures over 30 °C, followed by data centres (∼20–30%) and offices (∼20%). Location has the strongest relative influence for school and office buildings and equipment energy intensity for data centres. The Australia-wide combined DR potential for school, office and data centres is estimated to be between 551 and 647 MW. Office buildings have the highest aggregate potential at between 1.5 and 1.7 times that of school buildings and between 9 and 11 times that of data centres.