Supply demand coordination for building energy saving

Due to large amount of energy consumed in buildings, building energy saving has become an important research area recently. The total energy consumed during building operations is determined by the building energy efficiency and the total demand. On the one hand, though most existing studies focus on improving building energy efficiency, there are limits. On the other hand, the demand grows fast and without limit. Therefore it is important to coordinate the supply and demand in buildings. We consider this important problem in this paper and make the following major contributions. First, the concept of mean electricity price (MEP) is defined to measure the average cost to generate electricity using the multiple generation devices. Second, a comfort model of occupant is developed to capture the tradeoff between comfort in temperature and cost. Human building interaction allows the user to adjust their temperature set ranges according to the MEP in real time. Third, numerical examples are used to show significant energy saving potential using this framework. We hope this work brings insight to building energy saving in general.