Study on Building Thermal Characteristics for Smart Grid

Energy shortage and environment degradation have become critical issues for sustainable development. Both electrical grid as major energy supplier and buildings as major energy end-users play important roles in energy saving and emission reduction. This paper presents a brief review of smart grid and building demand response in recent years. Electrical grid has been upgrading to smart grid aims to avoid blackout in extensive areas (e.g. USA blackout in 2003 and India blackout in 2012) and improve energy efficiency including developments of distributed generation (e.g. renewable energies) and distributed storage (e.g. electrical storages). Buildings contribute their energy potentials using demand side management. However, energy information and potentials of both buildings and electrical grid have been seldom estimated and communicated with each other. In order to achieve the overall energy performance of both buildings and smart grid, this paper proposes a concept of interactive strategy between buildings at demand side and smart grid at power supply side by considering the energy processes (generation, storage, consumption) of participants. Alterative electricity load profile of buildings and dynamic electricity price of smart grid become the key factors of estimating building thermal characteristics and smart grid energy status (i.e. power surplus/shortage) in the interactive strategy. A case study of simulation is also presented to illustrate processes of interaction and characterization.