Energy management in residential buildings using energy hub approach

Abstract

Building-owned micro energy hubs (EHs) usually focus on optimal energy consumption cost and emission, whereas, macro energy hubs (MEHs) mainly concentrate on utility’s interest termed as network load deviation. Therefore, a bi-level MEH control capable of simultaneously attaining bilateral stakes is required. However, in real life energy distribution systems, MEH structure operates under uncertainties such as unpredictable solar photovoltaic (PV) irradiance and unplanned electric and natural gas (NG) network outages. Such uncertain conditions may affect the MEH’s performance (energy cost, emission and network load deviation) and resilience (capability of recovering quickly from disturbances) undesirably. Objective of this paper is to attain an optimal compromise between the performance and the resilience of a bi-level residential MEH, under uncertain conditions. In first step, risk neutral bi-level MEH is proposed to optimally reduce the network load deviation, while obeying the customer specified comfort, emission and cost constraints. However, this strategy disregards the risk introduced by the uncertainties. In second step, risk averse strategy is devised by incorporating conditional value at risk (CVaR) in the objective function, for improvement in resilience. Proposed linear bi-level risk averse MEH is mapped in conventional flower pollination algorithm (FPA). Resilience of the MEH is measured in terms of energy stored in the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) and thermal energy storage (TES). Third step concentrates on the development of an efficient solution technique for energy management system to obtain better solution. For this, an improved version of FPA, termed as 2-cored FPA is proposed and employed to solve the model. Proposed technique has a filtration layer (termed as core-1) that consists of random walk, local pollination and global pollination to obtain improved pollinators. Subsequently, these pollinators are injected into conventional FPA layer (termed as core-2) to obtain better solution. Comparison of results demonstrates that under risk averse approach with two cores, the energy retaining capability of the PHEV and the TES increases by 31.66% and 57.66%, respectively.