Pro-active and re-active dispatch of energy flexible buildings using peer-to-peer markets for building-to-grid integration
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Swaminathan, Siddharth
- Graduate Program:
- Architectural Engineering (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 25, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Minghui Zhu, Outside Field Member
Greg Pavlak, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
James Freihaut, Major Field Member
Nilanjan Ray Chaudhuri, Outside Unit Member
Julian Wang, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- Model predictive controls
building-to-grid integration
non-wires alternative
peer-to-peer markets
microgrid sizing
energy flexible buildings - Abstract:
- Deregulation of the electricity sector, the rise of distributed generation, and a growing interest towards local resilience have led to increasing attention on the application of load flexibility in regulating the local grid. As buildings are becoming smarter, the use of building control systems to regulate building load for different strategies, such as peak demand limiting or load shifting, is also becoming increasingly prevalent. This research focuses on the role of energy flexible buildings in the integration of renewable energies in a future smart grid. More specifically, it considers building load flexibility in two scenarios namely the 1) design and 2) the operational phase of a future grid. Three studies/investigations were performed with one study for the design phase and two studies for the operational phase considering peer-to-peer (P2P) markets. To this end, the first investigation assesses the influence of building load flexibility on the sizing strategy of a building-level microgrid. A nested optimal sizing and dispatch model of a microgrid with model predictive control is developed consisting of a microturbine, PV, and electric battery storage. Simulations are carried out for representative days for a building-level microgrid serving a medium-sized commercial building. Results show that savings in first costs and operational costs can be realized if advanced building controls are considered during design and component selection. Moreover, the savings is largely attributed to buildings reducing the load during the peak day by following pre-cooling/sub-cooling control strategies. Under the operational phase objective, the second investigation considers communal coordination of building load flexibility achieved through participation in aggregator-run P2P markets. The non-wires alternative problem is addressed in this study with buildings, complemented by PV, shifting from their optimal strategies to provide load reduction during the critical hours of transformer overload. This is achieved by treating the Pareto solutions obtained from running a multi-objective optimization favoring reduction in building operating costs as bids for submission to a market. The market using a knapsack solver then chooses a combination of strategies submitted by all participants that cumulatively provide the required load reduction. Here, the complexity in building models in comparison to scaling requirements is managed by separating the bid generation from the selection of winning control strategies. Results show confidence in the capability of buildings to provide the required load reduction for the non-wires alternative use-case and also leveraging PV generation in the afternoon hours to provide this load reduction. Lastly, in the third investigation, bidding strategies for buildings are developed based on a model-perturbation approach for participation in a local peer-to-peer market. Here, the bidding strategies are developed under three scenarios in which the buildings maximize individual financial gains, improve larger macro grid conditions albeit with some losses and, bid according to changing local PV generation respectively. The proposed market is run by an aggregator integrated with the wholesale electricity market and is implemented through smart contracts and distributed ledgers. Simulations studies indicate that greater participation in the local market resulted in greater benefits to the participants. Overall, the three investigations were capable of showing the impact building load flexibility can have when considered in solving different use-cases required by a future grid.