From Virtual Power Plant (VPP) to Sustainable Energy Microsystem (SEM): An opportunity for buildings energy management

The current attention to energy management leads to the necessity to tack new challenges for a best integration of renewable energies, mobility systems and new technologies for the energy efficiency, creating several micro grids with an active interaction with the main energy distribution networks. The integration of more energy systems seems to be the key of the future development and at present it is mainly applied to industrial systems, where Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are very promising instruments for promoting an effective integration. Since the built environment is one of the biggest consumers of primary energy worldwide and considering the complexity of some residential and tertiary users, the paper proposes the application of the basic principles of the VPP to the building environment introducing new functions typical of the urban context. The paper shows how an optimization algorithms, traditionally used in the industrial sector to schedule and operate a cluster of energy resources, can be successfully adapted also to residential and tertiary frameworks, proposing the aggregation of several energy sub-systems (SS), generally operated as independent, in a single one named Sustainable Energy Microsystem (SEM).