From Smart to Sustainable to Grid-Friendly: A Generic Planning Framework for Enabling the Transition Between Smart Home Archetypes

Abstract

The concept of nearly zero energy (nZE) or sustainable buildings is prominently featured in the EU's energy strategy. However, transitioning to the envisioned era of "smartness" and "sustainability" involves overcoming several technoeconomic barriers: the difference in nature between different building archetypes, the simultaneous management of daily and yearly objectives by the energy management system (EMS), the impact on distribution grids and the required modelling detail. Focusing on addressing such concerns in the scope of the residential sector, this work proposes a generic mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) framework for modelling smart appliances (conventional and new advanced approaches) as well as for the seamless transition of residential homes from passive to smart, to sustainable and finally to grid-friendly entities. The framework includes an adaptive rolling horizon strategy accounting for the yearly nZE objective and a cost-grid impact trade-off strategy for handling flexibility requests. The energy management framework and all developed models are validated in several different scenarios, including a comprehensive sensitivity analysis.

Grid-Friendly Smart Sustainable Buildings: Flexibility-to-Cost Mapping

“…Any active power purchased (P I ) and sold (P E ) from and into the grid has an associated linear cost and profit, respectively. The active power exchange should remain below 3kW, otherwise a linear penalty kicks in, similarly to a local congestion tariff [1]. All (small-scale) MINLP and NLP models are built in GAMS and solve within a few seconds.…”

“…The grid-friendly smart sustainable building (GF-SSB) was first discussed in [1]. Without compromising its owner's economic objectives, it unites the following: the EU's directive toward more environmentally friendly buildings and the desire of distribution system operators (DSOs) that end-users be more active in grid management.…”

“…Without compromising its owner's economic objectives, it unites the following: the EU's directive toward more environmentally friendly buildings and the desire of distribution system operators (DSOs) that end-users be more active in grid management. However, work [1] treats the product of flexibility unconventionally: it opposes conventional research, which employs profit-intrusive techniques [2], or approaches based on the maximization of social welfare [3].…”

“…With no relevant research works available, the link between flexibility envelopes and their monetary value is highly prevalent and crucial to address. We propose a novel, "owner-first" [1] methodology for the single-period one-to-one (1-1) cost mapping of the GF-SSB's flexibility envelope, complemented by power-factor-dependent "marketization" strategies.…”