Frequency Regulation From Commercial Building HVAC Demand Response

Abstract

The expanding penetration of nondispatchable renewable resources within power system generation portfolios is motivating the development of demand-side strategies for balancing generation and load. Commercial heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) loads are potential candidates for providing such demand-response (DR) services as they consume significant energy and because of the temporal flexibility offered by their inherent thermal inertia. Several ancillary services markets have recently opened up to participation by DR resources, provided they can satisfy certain performance metrics. We discuss different control strategies for providing frequency regulation DR from commercial HVAC systems and components, and compare performance results from experiments and simulation. We also present experimental results from a single $\sim$ 30 000-m $^{2}$ office building and quantify the DR control performance using standardized performance criteria. Additionally, we evaluate the cost of delivering this service by comparing the energy consumed while providing DR against a counterfactual baseline.