Demand Response with Model Predictive Comfort Compliance in an Office Building

The change in the electricity supply towards solar and wind is creating new stability and balancing challenges for the electricity grid. A solution to these challenges is to change the consumption of the demand-side in particular buildings. Efforts to help change the demand-side in buildings evolves around the idea of Demand-Response. However, the impact of moving, shedding or filling loads in buildings has a large impact on building occupants. In order to further the spread of DR systems, it is necessary to consider the impact of DR on comfort. In particular to assess it to ensure compliance with both soft demands for comfort, as well as harder demands such as minimum running systems and law requirements. Furthermore, the impact on comfort needs to be calculated to an order of accuracy that is high enough to ensure proper scheduling of DR events while also meeting acceptable thresholds for the effects on the occupants. In this paper we evaluate to which degree a Model Predictive Control (MPC) system can deliver comfort compliance. We will discuss the design of a DR capable MPC system that can plan ahead and use a building's potential for DR while also providing comfort for occupants. We also present the results from a case-study utilizing MPC in an office building. We study the compliance over multiple times a day and week to consider different building states and occupancy patterns, taking into account external factors such as weather patterns and building structures. Lessons learned are summarized to inform the design of such systems and characterize their applicability. We also study the value of occupancy predictions and how these affect predictions compared to utilizing standard schedules for a building.