Coordinating the operations of smart buildings in smart grids

With big thermal storage capacity and controllable loads such as the heating ventilation and air conditioning systems, buildings have great potential in providing demand response services to the smart grid. However, uncoordinated energy management of a large number of buildings in a distribution feeder can push power distribution systems into the emergency states where operating constraints are not completely satisfied. In this paper, we propose a bi-level building load aggregation methodology to coordinate the operations of heterogeneous smart buildings of a distribution feeder. The proposed methodology not only reduces the electricity costs of buildings but also guarantees that all the distribution operating constraints such as the distribution line thermal limit, phase imbalance, and transformer capacity limit are satisfied.