Overview: Smart Buildings As Enablers for a Smarter Grid

Buildings account for more than two thirds of the total electricity consumption and respective carbon emissions. The concept of the smart building has been spurred on by a demand for security, comfort and energy efficiency. Smart building will increasingly benefit from cheap, easily deployable sensing and actuation technologies being integrated into intelligent building automation systems. This trend presents new opportunities for resilient and sustainable grid operation.

The US government has set a target at 20% renewable energy by 2020, and it can be foreseen that an increasing number of buildings will be equipped with onsite renewables, such as wind and solar, in addition to large-scale wind and solar farms. Renewable generation poses well known planning and scheduling challenges, and may even threaten the overall stability and efficiency of the grid.

Smart buildings hold the potential to improve grid operations by being a smart consumer, agent and partner. A building acting as smart consumer leverages pertinent information about the processes it houses in the context of the electricity markets. Reduction of peak demand and overall consumption are two of the most significant benefits of being a smart consumer. However, a building acting as a smart agent, can offer even more services to the grid. The rapid deployment of onsite generation and storage has endowed the buildings with increased flexibility of their energy management strategies. Through these resources, if intelligently managed, buildings are poised to support grid stability and reduce the need for utilities to build more power plants, with the ultimate goal of carbon reduction in partnership with the electricity generation and distribution system.

These new opportunities for resilient and sustainable grid operation pose novel challenges for analyzing information exchanged among users, buildings and the grid, and synthesizing new service models that can improve efficiency, stability, and the quality of service. The development of a holistic energy management system necessitates an interoperable platform for integrating data from disparate sources, and a rigorous analytical and computational framework for optimizing overall system efficiency and resiliency. The availability of fine-grained user/system data from buildings and the grid also exposes privacy and security risks. There is clearly a need for tools and methods to address the efficiency-vulnerability tradeoff that is inherent to the system.