Occupant engaged fast demand responses for commercial buildings

Abstract

Occupants are excluded from traditional commercial building Demand Responses (DR) control loop. During the DR events, utility companies send DR requests to commercial building facility managers (FMs), who often send emails to occupants with generic instructions. Unless the buildings are equipped with advanced hardware, office building FMs have limited means to reduce significant pick load in the DR periods. We present a software-based, occupant-engaged fast DR system for commercial office buildings. Our collaborative DR (cDR) module is built upon our collaborative energy management and control (CEMC) platform. Through the web portal, occupants can submit their temperature range and schedule. Then, utilizing our 4 point arbitration system, we can shed significant peak load without scarificing occupants' comfort. During field experiments on a mid-size office building at Pittsburgh, we observed 1.6% load reduction for the traditional email-based DR method and 19% load reduction using our cDR system.