Impact of Demand-Side Management on Thermal Comfort and Energy Costs in a Residential nZEB

Abstract

Abstract:In this study, simulation work has been carried out to investigate the impact of a demand-side management control strategy in a residential nZEB. A refurbished apartment within a multi-family dwelling representative of Mediterranean building habits was chosen as a study case and modelled within a simulation framework. A flexibility strategy based on set-point modulation depending on the energy price was applied to the building. The impact of the control strategy on thermal comfort was studied in detail with several methods retrieved from the standards or other literature, differentiating the effects on day and night living zones. It revealed a slight decrease of comfort when implementing flexibility, although this was not prejudicial. In addition, the applied strategy caused a simultaneous increase of the electricity used for heating by up to 7% and a reduction of the corresponding energy costs by up to around 20%. The proposed control thereby constitutes a promising solution for shifting heating loads towards periods of lower prices and is able to provide benefits for both the user and the grid sides. Beyond that, the activation of energy flexibility in buildings (nZEB in the present case) will participate in a more successful integration of renewable energy sources (RES) in the energy mix.

The Impact of Optimal Demand Response Control and Thermal Energy Storage on a District Heating System

“…The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the operation of DH networks and to automatically shape energy demand has been researched across Europe [5][6][7][8][9]. This has been defined as demand-side management, which is an umbrella term for different building-side management strategies including peak clipping, valley filling and demand response (DR) [10].…”

“…Through successful simulations and the availability of commercial control devices, DR has been also studied in the DH context in field tests [7,14,15], demonstrating that ICT, including Internet of Things and cloud computing, are technically viable with commercial potential. This has been also concluded by Zhang et al [16]: the technological readiness of digital transition at the building level has been already demonstrated.…”

“…Several studies that have modelled district energy systems, including those that incorporate TES, are discussed in a review paper of Sameti and Haghighat [7]. They noticed that the objective function optimizes typically amongst others carbon emissions, production, revenue, operation costs and fuel costs.…”

Interactive Buildings: A Review

“…Load flexibility is created when the temporal occurrence between demand and supply is decoupled through either electrical storage or building active and passive thermal energy storage systems. And, optimizing demand flexibility allows for the integration of more renewable resources in the energy use of NZEBs [109].…”

“…Resource sharing involves considering the building as a system situated within the context of an ensemble or cluster of buildings. The system of systems perspective provides potential in waste heat management, distributed energy resource design and operation optimization and aggregated grid services [109]. The biggest challenge in building cluster interaction is the control and aggregation of resources.…”