Towards a standardized building assessment for demand response

This paper addresses the setup of an aggregation of office buildings to provide services for the electricity grid. In order to determine the energy shifting potential of different buildings for a given time of the day, a standardized assessment procedure based on Model Predictive Control and predefined price signals is proposed. The aim is to provide the aggregator with an index describing the additional energy used for a desired change in power consumption for each building and for each hour of the day, enabling him to choose a good portfolio of buildings for providing the grid service cost-effectively. We first show in an experiment on a real office building in Switzerland the possibility of shifting the electricity consumption as well as a comparison of experiments and simulations for this building case. We then use this building case to test the proposed procedure in simulation and provide an hourly analysis of the power shifting potential for different seasons.