A generalized load management gateway coupling smart buildings to the grid

Abstract

Buildings are currently largely passive participants in the electric grid. As functional and residential buildings are responsible for a sizeable share of energy consumption in the industrialized world, use in demand side management schemes is a promising area in a future smart power grid. As each individual building, especially in the residential sector, offers only limited load shifting potential and associated financial gain, acceptance of demand response programs that require manual user interaction is unlikely. Instead, schemes based on automatic control are a viable alternative. This paper proposes a building agent, which acts as load management gateway, autonomously managing a building as a single unit, utilizing load models on one hand and a generic communication scheme that avoids close coupling of building and grid on the other hand. The agent manipulates the consumption profile of the building in a way, which matches the demands of the smart grid and offers the resulting load shifting potential to the grid.

A method for automatically scheduling notified deferrable loads

“…Currently, algorithmic techniques for load management are in vogue [10], [11], [12], [13]. These techniques do not rely on the whims of consumers in responding to prices and could be used in conjunction with load-shedding to increase reliability while also increasing load factor.…”

Conducted Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) in Smart Grids

“…In order to achieve the assumed high level of renewable energy content the application of advanced metering and control techniques (grid automatic enabling island operation contributes to increased reliability), energy storage devices, and demand management techniques e.g. active demand response (ADR) are required [6,16,18,19,25,31,43,54,55,67,68,72,73,75,82,112]. • A typical feature of this system is the high quality of electric energy, elimination of higher range harmonics, voltage dips, sags, interruptions, and asymmetry of phase voltages.…”

“…• End-users perform an active role in Smart Grids, they are both consumers and producers of electric energy-so-called ''prosumers'' (Smart Buildings, Smart Cities). Management of electric energy production and consumption processes makes possible the improvement of the voltage profile and local balancing of electricity production and demand as well as an increase in energy distribution efficiency [8,16,43,59,83,100,106,107,113]. • The Smart Grid has to be ready for new challenges, such as, the development of the electric vehicle market.…”

Predictive Control of Power Grid-Connected Energy Systems Based on Energy and Exergy Metrics

“…The third category includes building-to-grid (B2G) integration in which performance of buildings including comfort level and energy cost is optimized considering grid side information [147,156,162,163,164,165,166,167], and demonstrates its usefulness for grid services. However, in the modeling in [147,156,162,163,164,165,166,167] distribution grid is simplified or completely ignored. Survey results in This study improves previous single level optimization of buildings by considering the grid model and builds upon preliminary results in [173] by the authors.…”