Greenhouse gas emission reduction in residential buildings: A lightweight model to be deployed on edge devices

Abstract

Electricity produced and used in the residential sector is responsible for approximately 30% of the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE). Insulating houses and integrating renewable energy and storage resources are key for reducing such emissions. However, it is not only a matter of installing renewable energy technologies but also of optimizing the charging/discharging of the storage units. A number of optimization models have been proposed lately to address this problem. However, they are often limited in several respects: (i) they often focus only on electricity bill reduction, placing GHGE reduction on the backburner; (ii) they rarely propose hybrid-energy storage optimization strategies considering thermal and storage heater units; (iii) they are often designed using Linear Programming (LP) or metaheuristic techniques that are computational intensive, hampering their deployment on edge devices; and (iv) they rarely evaluate how the model impacts on the battery lifespan. Given this state-of-affairs, the present article compares two approaches, the first one proposing an innovative sliding grid carbon intensity threshold algorithm developed as part of a European project named RED WoLF, the second one proposing an algorithm designed based on LP. The comparison analysis is carried out based on two distinct real-life scenarios in France and UK. Results show that both algorithms contribute to reduce GHGE compared to a solution without optimization logic (between 10 to 25%), with a slight advantage for the LP algorithm. However, RED WoLF makes it possible to reduce significantly the computational time (≈25 min for LP against ≈1ms for RED WoLF) and to extend the battery lifespan (4 years for LP against 12 years for RED WoLF).