Optimal operation for energy-efficient building micro-grid

Buildings consume more than 40% of the total world energy, exceeding industry and transportation and becoming the largest energy consumer since 2011. In China, buildings are expected to be responsible for more than 35% of the total energy consumption till 2020. Considering the energy crisis and for the sustainable development of human society, more and more attention has been focused on energy-efficient buildings. With the development of distributed renewable energy, micro-grid technology has also been applied to improve the building energy efficiency. With this background, we consider the building energy using and scheduling problem in this paper and the features of our work are as follows. First, we build the electrical energy scheduling problem in a networked building micro-grid as a Markov decision process. Second, considering the non-stationary solar power generation, we use dynamic programming to solve this finite-stage MDP problem. Third, a 3-node building micro-grid based on Tsinghua University is used to test and verify the effectiveness of our proposed model and solving method.