FlexTECC: Flexible Timing of Energy Consumption in Communities

There is a growing need for energy demand to be flexible, i.e. to easily change when energy is consumed, due to the unpredictable nature of the wind-driven electricity grid envisioned for the UK’s future low-carbon energy system. Building heating systems can be a relatively inexpensive option to provide that flexibility due to the inherent ability to store energy within the system and the thermal mass of the building itself. However, still is much unknown about the amount of flexibility that can be delivered from buildings and how that flexibility can be used to support the electricity grid. Additionally, individual buildings, due to the current regulatory framework, are too small to contribute flexible demand directly to the electricity system. They must be aggregated to be large enough to meet connection requirements and therefore must work together as a community.

My fellowship research aims to understand how electrically heated homes and buildings can operate efficiently and provide services to the broader energy system. During this talk, I will discuss the first-year results of my fellowship research. Specially, I will describe a model predictive control approach to enable fixed-demand reductions from a collection of UK residences, heated with air source heat pumps, tested through a co-simulation strategy. The analysis shows that the flexibility capacity and availability vary as a function of season, time of day, occupant comfort preferences, occupancy patterns, and building construction type. It also shows that intelligent aggregation can lead to lower peak demands and energy consumption.

Dr. Bianca Howard is a lecturer (Assistant Professor) in urban energy modelling in the School of Architecture, Building, and Civil Engineering at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. Within the school, she is a member of the Building Energy Research Group, 10 academics working on intelligent and high-performance buildings. She currently holds a prestigious UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) Innovation Fellowship (2018-2021) entitled “FlexTECC: Flexible Timing of Energy Consumption in Communities”. She is a member of the International Building Performance and Simulation Association (IBPSA) and chair of the IBPSA-England Building Simulation and Optimization 2020 Conference.

Previous to her appointment at Loughborough, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the urban systems laboratory in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London. She received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University in the City of New York through the US NSF IGERT Traineeship Solving Urbanisation Challenges through Design with Professor Vijay Modi. The research she conducts and manages works towards developing the underlying methodological approaches to empower policy makers, urban planners, building operators, and facilities managers to deliver energy efficient, low carbon, and flexible buildings and communities.