Flexibility quantification in the context of flexible heat and power for buildings

The European Horizon 2020 project Flexible Heat and Power (H2020 FHP) investigates how to exploit the thermal inertia of buildings and their Heating Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems as a source of flexibility to offer Demand Response (DR) strategies. The goal of this project is to provide a framework that allows increasing the energy state of buildings during generation peaks and lowering their energy use when supply is scarce (and thus expensive), while respecting the indoor thermal comfort. In order to achieve that goal, a Dynamic Coalition Manager (DCM) architecture has been defined. To estimate the cost of changing the demand behaviour a measure for flexibility is required as well, i.e., the capacity of the load to behave differently compared to the baseline scenario. This flexibility quantification is needed to estimate the flexibility offer that the DCM can make to other market players such as the Distribution System Operators (DSOs) and Balance Responsible Parties (BRPs). Hence, the chosen flexibility indicator must be scalable since it has to be aggregated for a cluster of buildings. There already exist several ways of quantifying thermal flexibility of buildings. However, assessing and comparing the different definitions is a complicated task since the suitability of each indicator for its specific application is crucial. In this paper a flexibility quantification based on multiple Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategies is developed for an individual building, which is aggregated for a cluster of buildings. The flexibility indicator is demonstrated using grey-box models for the BAs.status: Published onlin