HVAC system dynamic management in communities via an aggregation–disaggregation framework

Abstract

The aggregation and disaggregation problem of Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems in the building at the community-level have been considered in this work. The aim is to provide capacity reserves as a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) to support power system operation, improving grid reliability and efficiency in the face of increased use of renewable energy. Motivated by the layered operating structure of the power grid, an aggregation–disaggregation framework which operates at both slow and fast time-scales is proposed. At the slow time-scale, each building forecasts its HVAC system future electric power consumption information using predictions of disturbance and information of thermal zone via solving certain optimization problems. These values will be collected by a control center such as a community aggregator. Acting as a VPP, the control center determines each HVAC system future nominal electric power consumption by participating in the real-time electricity market or an independent power allocation plan. At the fast time-scale, a modified primal–dual gradient method based distributed control scheme is designed such that under real disturbances, the system can track the nominal consumption as closely as possible using only neighboring communications and local measurements. Finally, a numerical study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.