A demand side management approach to increase self-consumption in buildings

There is a growing interest in increasing the presence of renewable energy in the electric network. Photovoltaic production from grid-connected systems is leading this growth in terms of households. Alongside this development, concern about network security has emerged, because excesses of intermittent renewable energy on the grid could exceed voltage limits. Self-consumption, understood as the capacity of the producer to consume his or her own production, can partially solve these problems. Thermostatic controllable loads, such as heating and cooling, represent 50% of the total amount of energy consumed by buildings; the proper allocation of these loads could be a driving force for self-consumption. In this study, a demand side management strategy is proposed based on a building energy model equipped with an inverter heat pump coupled with a photovoltaic plant. The goal is to maximize the use of local energy from the photovoltaic plant (self-consumption), reducing the export and import of energy to and from the grid. This goal is achieved by optimizing the set-points in each room. An array of optimal set-points over six years is presented. The results show the capacity of the methodology to match similar values of self-consumption (70% in winter and 50% in summer) obtained by strategies based on chemical batteries. The findings are shown in an energy matching chart at different levels of detail (yearly and monthly). Color bubbles are added to the matching chart to help visualize the unmatched energy of the system graphically. In comparison with actual model predictive control technologies, this study's strategy offers great simplicity and a large saving in computational time.