EnergyTest: A tool for assessing building energy sustainability

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the development of (nearly) zero-energy buildings (ZEBs), i.e., buildings that deliver (nearly) the same amount of energy to the supply grid as it is drawn from it on a yearly basis. This paper investigates the ability of such ZEBs to performing in a truly self-sustainable fashion, i.e., minimising the frequency of energy exchange with the outer grid, through appropriate charging/discharging actions of a storage system. A realistic simulation environment called EnergyTest is developed on purpose to simulate the electrical load consumption in an aggregate of houses, in order to perform the sustainability assessment

Using electric vehicles to improve building energy sustainability

“…More precisely, we model there types of drivers: full-time workers, part-time workers and non-workers. Statistical information on typical employment situation in Italy in 2013 are derived from publicly available data that are provided by the National Institute for Statistics (ISTAT) 3 and from statistics of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 4 . It is important to point out that the proposed mobility model considers average behaviours on a nation-wide scale, while each single town may be characterised with different behaviours.…”

“…Thus, in the following we indifferently use the term car and PEV. 3 www.istat.it 4 stats.oecd.org on national time-use surveys, we assume that the duration of leisure activities is uniformly distributed with mean 2 hours and time span half an hour. As in [15] we also assume that half of the full-time workers is going to leisure activities after work, whereas the other half drives home directly.…”

“…In this study we adopt the same building model as in [3], which is also implemented in our ENERGYTEST simulation tool. For the sake of clarity we only report the salient features of the model, while the reader is referred to [3] for a detailed description.…”

“…Reference [3] showed through a realistic simulation that indeed ZEBs are far from being truly self-sustainable most of the time, even if they are equipped with very large PV panels. Also, it was shown that a practical way to increase their sustainability is to further equip the buildings with an electrical storage system (e.g., a battery).…”

“…Accordingly, in this paper we want to assess the feasibility of the usage of PEVs as a virtual battery device to exchange energy with the buildings, provided that the PEVs are always charged up to a minimum level desired by the owners. For this purpose, we accurately model the expected mobility patterns of PEVs, which together with the load models for most typical household electrical appliances and a PV power production model is then embedded into our simulator ENERGYTEST, already illustrated in [3]. We then run an ensemble of 1-year simulations to infer some conclusions about what fraction of PEV battery capacity should be shared to effectively compensate for PV energy production variability.…”