Simulation-based design optimization of houses with low grid dependency

Abstract

There is significant growth in the utilization of renewable energy in the built environment. Due to the intermittent nature of most renewable energy sources, energy mismatch problems between on-site generation and demand both in hourly and seasonal levels are unavoidable. This problem is more significant in Northern latitudes, as in summer there is high solar availability despite low or no electricity demand for cooling and in winter the solar availability is low when there is a high demand for heating. In addition, energy-pricing policies are leading to less or no Photovoltaic (PV) feed-in-tariffs in the near future and/or even providing incentives to uphold self-consumption. Therefore, it is important to enhance the energy flexibility potential of a building to improve utilization of on-site generated energy. In this study, a performance optimization of various residential building designs with differences in energy demand, on-site energy generation and storage sizes is carried out considering future policy scenarios. The objective is to minimize the dependency to the nearby energy grid and maximize the self-consumption. To achieve this, a performance-based design support framework is proposed and demonstrated using a case study.