Building Efficiency:
Commercial Buildings and the Electric Power Grid

The transformative changes currently underway in the electric power sector are also affecting the commercial buildings sector. For example, the restructuring of the power sector has brought opportunities to commercial building owners and operators to choose their preferred suppliers of electricity. The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) allows for the introduction of dynamic pricing of electricity. The smart grid technologies and energy management systems (EMS) in buildings allow for the demand response, load shifting, and other modifications of load profiles and electricity usage patterns. Finally, wider implementation of energy storage technologies, both thermal and electrochemical, would allow commercial buildings to exercise more control over their electricity usage patterns and would provide much greater flexibility in their use of various mechanisms for building energy management systems (EMS). It is expected that energy storage capabilities will represent an integral part of high-performance commercial buildings in the future.

The objective of this project is to investigate the interactions between the commercial buildings and power sectors and how these two sectors might affect each other in the future. As dynamic electricity prices will have an impact on the demand in commercial buildings, the demand response actions by building owners and operators will, in turn, have an impact on the power system. The various demand response actions and load control strategies (with and without energy storage) employed by commercial buildings will result in reduced electricity demand during the peak hours, more economical operation of the power system and lower electricity prices.

To study these complex interactions, we chose to develop an agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) framework. By representing commercial buildings as intelligent agents that react to electricity price signals from the electricity market and decide on appropriate demand response and load control actions, the ABMS framework allows for a realistic simulation of the behavior of commercial building owners and operators. Building agents can have different load control mechanisms and operation strategies for performing their demand response actions.

During the simulation, each building agent is independent in its decision-making process regarding the choice of an appropriate demand response action and load control strategy. In addition, the building agents, even of the same type, can be further differentiated by their geographical locations (different weather data), climate zones (different building design), and zonal positions within the power grid (different electricity prices).

This project was funded by U.S. Department of Energy's Building Technologies Program.

More

• Agent-based Modeling of Interaction between Commercial Building Stocks and Power Grid (PDF)

March 2011