Abstract
The energy flexibility from buildings will likely include heating flexibility, because the largest part of energy consumption in buildings is space heating and tap water heating. It is still unclear how much flexibility can be provided by altering when/how buildings are using energy to provide heating, without explicitly adding heating storage. This potential depends on the building type (residential, office, etc.), the heating technology, and what range of temperatures the end-users in a building considers comfortable.
For a building to have monetary motivation to provide energy flexibility, the building owner needs to get energy cost savings or revenues in return. It is further important to weigh the cost of providing the flexibility to its benefit. Today, buildings can adapt to hourly price signal from electricity prices and/or power grid tariffs. In the near future, buildings can potentially coordinate and provide bids to a relevant flexibility market.
Energy flexibility from heating buildings requires planning, because delaying energy usage for heating will require that the delay is either prepared (pre-heating) or recovered (post-heating). There exists methodological frameworks, including model predictive control, to do this planning given well-defined user preferences and good predictions of relevant parameters for some hours ahead. To provide such predictions, data collection of the relevant parameters are crucial; however, real-life data tend to have unsatisfactory quality.
User acceptance is key to enable building flexibility in a large scale. The concept of "thermal comfort" is important to consider, i.e., satisfaction with the thermal environment. In general, research find that people prefer slow changing temperatures and tolerate more heating variation than cooling variation. Nevertheless, thermal comfort is subjective, and there seems to be no "one-size-fits-all" when it comes to acceptable temperature changes in buildings.
For a building to have monetary motivation to provide energy flexibility, the building owner needs to get energy cost savings or revenues in return. It is further important to weigh the cost of providing the flexibility to its benefit. Today, buildings can adapt to hourly price signal from electricity prices and/or power grid tariffs. In the near future, buildings can potentially coordinate and provide bids to a relevant flexibility market.
Energy flexibility from heating buildings requires planning, because delaying energy usage for heating will require that the delay is either prepared (pre-heating) or recovered (post-heating). There exists methodological frameworks, including model predictive control, to do this planning given well-defined user preferences and good predictions of relevant parameters for some hours ahead. To provide such predictions, data collection of the relevant parameters are crucial; however, real-life data tend to have unsatisfactory quality.
User acceptance is key to enable building flexibility in a large scale. The concept of "thermal comfort" is important to consider, i.e., satisfaction with the thermal environment. In general, research find that people prefer slow changing temperatures and tolerate more heating variation than cooling variation. Nevertheless, thermal comfort is subjective, and there seems to be no "one-size-fits-all" when it comes to acceptable temperature changes in buildings.