Two-stage optimization for building energy management

Abstract

In recent years, the energy sector has undergone an important transformation as a result of technological progress and socioeconomic development. The continuous integration of renewable technologies drives the gradual transition from the traditional business model based on a reduced number of large power plants to a more decentralized energy production. The increasing energy demand and intermittent generation of renewable energy sources require modern control strategies to provide an uninterrupted service and guarantee high energy efficiency. Utilities and network operators permanently supervise production facilities and grids to compensate any mismatch between production and consumption. The enormous potential of local energy management contributes to grid stability and can be used to reduce the adverse effects of load variations and production fluctuations. This paper presents a building energy management which determines the optimal scheduling of all components of the local energy system. The two-stage optimization is based on a receding horizon strategy and minimizes two economic functions subject to the physical system constraints. The performance of the proposed building energy management is validated in simulations and the results are compared to the ones obtained with other energy management approaches.