LANS Informal Seminar: Michael Baldea

Seminar Title: Proactive Strategies for Energy Management in Residential Buildings
Speaker: Michael Baldea, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin

Date/Time: 2014-12-16 15:00
Location: Building 240 Room 1407

Description:
Residential buildings are responsible for about 20% of the primary energy consumption and about 30% of the electricity use in the United States. Residential electricity demand is highly variable and daily fluctuations can be difficult to cope with by grid operators and energy producers. Our research concerns managing energy use in residential buildings to achieve a load-leveling effect on the grid. We focus on the use of thermal energy storage in buildings (either passive – in the building structure, or active – using specialized devices such as chilled water tanks), and propose novel strategies for coordinating the use of storage systems with the operation of the grid. We present a new hierarchical control strategy, comprising a top-layer scheduling system, which orchestrates the use of active storage, with a lower-layer economic model predictive controller, which addresses temperature control and maintains occupant comfort. We also propose a large-scale framework leading to the implementation of these strategies at the level of an entire neighborhood. We validate many of our results with data collected from the Pecan Street Research Institute, a DOE-sponsored Smart Grid Demonstration Project headquartered at The University of Texas at Austin, showing that our strategy can lead to a reduction of over 20% in the peak neighborhood power demand.