Economic MPC of Aggregating Commercial Buildings for Providing Flexible Power Reserve

• Published in: IEEE transactions on power systems Vol. 30; no. 5; pp. 2685 - 2694
• Main Authors: Weijie Mai, Chung, C. Y.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-09-2015; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Aggregator; Atmospheric modeling; building-to-grid; Buildings; Data models; demand side management; Load modeling; Mathematical model; model predictive control; Temperature measurement; Thermal resistance
• ISSN: 0885-8950; 1558-0679
• DOI: 10.1109/TPWRS.2014.2365615

In order to increase the utilization of renewable energy sources and to reduce the need of generator-provided ancillary services and inefficient peaking generation, buildings are progressively transforming into smarter electricity consumers and active participants in power system operations. In this work, an R-C thermodynamic model of building that strongly relates to the power consumption of heating ventilation air-conditioning system (HVAC) is firstly introduced. To offer the aggregated flexible HVAC power to the grid as regulating power, we propose a building-aggregator-grid contract framework and formulate a robust model predictive control (MPC) algorithm which both maximizes the profit of aggregator and minimizes the payment of each participating building to optimally declare power flexibility. Lastly, simulation results on a group of real and hypothetical buildings validate the feasibility of the proposed method.