Application of market-based control with thermal energy storage system for demand limiting and real-time pricing control

Imbalances in energy demand and supply related to increased use of renewable energy sources will eventually cause problems with the reliability of the power grid. The reliability of the grid requires ancillary services for power generation, as well as flexible consumption via demand response. In this paper, a multi agent-based distributed control strategy is proposed for commercial buildings to coordinate the flexible building loads with thermal energy storage systems (TESS). The distributed control uses the market mechanisms and price/ incentive signals to engage self-interested responsive loads to provide services to the electrical power grid and managing buildings' electricity consumption. The proposed strategy was validated in a simulation environment to provide two grid service use cases. One is to limit the peak demand of building in which a market clearing strategy with respect to the demand limit is proposed. The other one is to perform price responsive control, in which the peak demand of building responds to the time of use price signals. The peak load reduction is calculated as a percentage of baseline peak load measured in the baseline for the same day. Energy consumption cost saving is defined as the percentage change from the baseline over the entire 5-day simulation. The results show that: (1) the demand limit control can reduce by up to 14% of building energy cost and 13% of peak demand and (2) the price response control can reduce by up to 16% of building energy cost. Overall, the results demonstrate that the distributed control with TESS proposed in this study is effective in reducing electricity use and peak building electric demand.