Balancing stakeholder priorities in the operation of combined heat and power systems

This work explores the impact of re-adjusting demand patterns (electricity and hot water) of building occupants on the economic and environmental performance of combined heat and power (CHP) systems. Trade-off analysis reveals that adjustments in demand patterns provide significant flexibility to synchronize electricity and hot water demands and with this it is possible to minimize water usage, emissions, and cost. As expected, however, such benefits come at expense of significant occupant dissatisfaction. To address this issue, we use a multi-stakeholder optimization framework that takes occupant priorities into account and computes a compromise solution that minimizes the collective stakeholder dissatisfaction. By using this framework, we find that there exist non-obvious CHP operating policies that achieve nearly perfect tracking of nominal occupant demands while significantly improving economic and environmental performance. The proposed framework can be used to inform occupants on the impact of their priorities on CHP performance.