Sam Babu Godithi supervised by Prof. Vishal Garg received his doctorate in IT Building Science (ITBS). Here’s a summary of his research work on Demand Response through Transactive Control over personal Environmental Control Systems:
The building sector consumes a significant amount of energy. The three major building performance areas are comfort, energy efficiency, and demand response capabilities. Building energy managers usually operate the buildings to maintain homogeneous indoor ambient conditions (like zone temperatures and lighting). However, occupants have individual thermal and visual comfort preferences. Maintaining a homogeneous indoor environment throughout the building/zones leads to unnecessary energy consumption as well as unmet occupant’s comfort needs. It has led the building science research community to pursue Personal Environment Control systems (PECS), such as local thermal conditioning systems like a heated computer keyboard, personal heaters, desk fans, and radiant cooling cubicles, and task lighting systems such as desk lamps. These systems create favourable micro-ambient conditions around each occupant. Also, in the recent past, widespread penetration of variable renewable generation and distributed energy resources (DER) has increased interest in using end-user devices and equipment in buildings as flexible devices to balance grid supply and demand, i.e., “GridResponsive” buildings. Integrating renewable resources introduces many operational challenges and uncertainty into the grid. The Demand Response (DR) strategies are applied to address these challenges. DR is a change in the power consumption of an electric utility customer to match the demand for power with the supply. The approach used to manage the DR is called Transactive Controls (TC). TC is a market-based control paradigm using “price” as the key operational parameter. The economists extensively dealt with TC in microeconomics. Further, primarily the building energy management systems (BEMS) manage DR events at the building or zone level in a commercial building. For example, in case of load shedding, it switches off low priority zone air conditioning or raises the set-point for cooling irrespective of usage in the whole building; dims all the lights regardless of the occupants and their needs during the DR event. The occupant does not get an opportunity at the time of the DR event to decide on which comfort parameters he is willing to forgo to meet the energy demand. Nevertheless, the literature study shows a gap and a need for a system/framework to integrate PECs within the task environment and between task & ambient to address the above challenges. Hence, as part of this thesis, iSPACE – intelligent System for Personal Ambient Control and energy Efficiency, has been developed to address the above challenges. iSPACE integrates transactive control methods, facilitating demand response strategies within personal environmental control systems. Keywords: Building Energy Conservation, Transactive Control, Demand Response, Personal Comfort Systems.
May 2024