| Abstract |
To successfully achieve the Green Deal and sustainability targets, the electricity grid requires a drastic increase of the energy efficiency and renewable energy resources, while considering its integration with other energy
carriers. The increased fraction of small, variable and less predictable decentralised generation causes balancing the electricity supply and demand to be ever more challenging and calls for increased flexibility in the electricity system. Hence, flexibility schemes lie at the core of the EU’s holy grail of an energy transition towards minimizing carbon emissions and achieving sustainable energy consumption, originating from the EU citizens themselves. However, current flexibility schemes exhibit several important shortcomings. First, the number of flexible assets they address is still quite limited, due to the prevalence of legacy systems and low adoption of smart solutions (i.e., Building Energy Management Systems and IoT/smart devices). Second, the design methodology to exploit flexibility does not proactively cater for consumer acceptance: users’ needs are not considered in a holistic way. Yet, user acceptance of proposed flexibility actions is highly dependent on properly accounting for, e.g., building occupants’ comfort levels, lifestyle, personal considerations, commuting needs or neighbourhood infrastructure. Third, although the set of core services that buildings provide to their occupants is rather well-defined and stationary, technologies and technical equipment required to implement them is heterogenous and varies dynamically over time. Thus, energy system operators struggle to maximally incorporate and benefit from demand side flexibility services, and to exploit them for operational and ancillary services that address their technical issues of ensuring resilience, efficiency, and reliability for modern electrical grids.
BlueBird will deliver a comprehensive and validated toolset, to fully allow competitive adoption of buildings as energy flexibility assets, supporting smooth integration of services towards energy market players (i.e., TSO, DSO, aggregators) while maximally aligning with end-user's (i.e., building managers, occupants) requirements and acceptance criteria. The project will enable connecting any building type to provide services to:
1. Optimize the building’s internal operation or flexibility, based on price signal (exploiting the synergies between all different systems connected to it, i.e., HVAC, storage, RES, DH, geothermal, gas...) and considering events and building usage conditions coming from external factors such as weather conditions, traffic conditions, air pollution, etc.
2. Optimize towards energy markets and offering flexibility services to a grid operator through aggregation by a Trading Manager (TM) that presents buildings as Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and thus summing buildings power to required magnitudes.
The BlueBird toolset will enable buildings to adapt to a wide range of operation modes, depending on the specific local conditions of the building (e.g., regulatory conditions, DR incentives). What specific services that can be implemented for a building will also depend on the “smartness” of each building, the assets availability and their controllability and flexibility (i.e., essentially the technical capabilities of the BEMS).
BlueBird will virtualize functions that map the building’s flexibility services to the underlying technological landscape and allow for flexible control (see Figure 1). This virtualization relies on building a digital twin of each of the physical components that specifies what services (e.g., heating, electricity) it can provide, whether it has any operating constraints – e.g. maximum storage capacity, abrasion of batteries, minimum startup temperatures for heat pumps – and what the internal costs of providing the service are.
To enable full adaptation to the different building configurations and maximize replicability, BlueBird will deliver independent, containerized components that can be combined as a toolset to accomplish the use case tasks – use-case driven toolsets. These components will be portable, reusable, and re-combinable within different systems. BlueBird solutions will be plug-and-play, where each use case components are selected, integrated, and deployed locally, at the edge, or on cloud. This approach will maximize replicability of BlueBird’s results, either by adopting independent function components or by creating customized toolsets for fulfilling new use cases. BlueBird will explicitly provide replicability guidelines and demonstrate key illustrative deployments. |
