Energy flexibility in residential buildings clusters

¹ Università Politecnica delle Marche, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e Scienze Matematiche, Via Brecce Bianche 12, 60131, Ancona, Italy
² Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto per le Tecnologie della Costruzione, Viale Lombardia 49, 20098, San Giuliano Milanese (MI), Italy
³ KU Leuven, Department of Mechanical Engineering, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium

^* Corresponding author: a.mugnini@pm.univpm.it

Abstract

The building sector represents one of the most energy-consuming worldwide and a great part of its consumption is accounted for residential demand for space heating and cooling. Although it is necessary to promote the buildings energy efficiency, energy flexibility is also of paramount importance to optimize the balance between demand and supply. In fact, an energy flexible building is defined as able to change, in a planned manner, the shape of its energy demand curve, electrical and thermal, while the comfort of the end-users is still guaranteed. Objective of this work is to exploit the energy demand management ability of different buildings composing a cluster, when their aggregated demand derived from electric heating systems (i.e. heat pumps) is subject to demand response (DR) strategies. Users with different occupancy profile are considered. By supposing to be able to activate the energy flexibility of the single building with thermostatic load control, different scenarios of cluster composition are evaluated in order to provide guidelines to implement optimal strategies for energy flexibility exploitation without drawback effects connected to the event.