Optimal Scheduling of Electricity Powered Thermal System for Demand Side Management of Buildings

The heating and cooling system coupled with thermal energy storages brings flexibility to demand side management of buildings. Its optimal operation may be very helpful to reduce the energy mismatch between availability of distributed photovoltaic (PV) generation and the demand in buildings where hot water, heating and cooling are delivered by electricity powered thermal system. An optimization problem for the demand side management of building multi-energy systems with feed-in electricity, renewable generations, thermal storage devices, and schedulable loads is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem, which could capture the coupling between the cooling, heating and electricity energy in the building energy systems and handle the correlation between the thermal storages and renewable generation. By solving the developed problem, the scheduling strategy of the electricity powered thermal system under time-of-use electricity price can be obtained. The performance of the developed method is demonstrated using numerical case studies under different demand situations. The results show that the thermal storage devices can significantly improve the energy efficiency of the building and save the total electricity cost.