PNNL

Abstract

The U.S. building sector, as one of the major energy users, consumed approximately 75% of electricity in 2019. By implementing renewable energy technologies and control strategies into buildings, the role of future’s buildings are not only the energy consumers, but also the energy generators. Due to this new feature, more communications among buildings and between buildings and the grid could provide more possibilities to optimize the energy performance of buildings. This paper studies the energy and cost performance of a power management system in a connected community using a new urban-scale building energy modeling framework developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. A virtual community, consisting of 22 commercial buildings, is designed. Three scenarios are studied: (1) electricity only supplied by the grid, (2) PV panels installed on and available to some but not all the buildings, and (3) an electricity connected community. To consider the impacts of locations and energy tariffs, this paper selects four cities and three electricity tariffs to evaluate the energy and cost performances of these three scenarios. The results show that the PV panels in Scenario 2 reduce 25% to 33% of the community-level electricity consumption and 20% to 30% of the community-level electricity cost compared with Scenario 1 in all studied locations and energy tariffs. By considering power management in the connected community (Scenario 3), the electricity consumption and cost can be further reduced by 6% to 7% and 5% to 11% respectively compared with Scenario 2.