Energy quality management for building clusters and districts (BCDs) through multi-objective optimization

• Energy quality management is applied from individual building to district.
• A novel time-effective multi-objective design optimization scheme is proposed.
• The scheme searches for exergy efficient and environmental solution for districts.
• System reliability is considered and addressed in this paper.

Renewable energy systems entail a significant potential to meet the energy requirements of building clusters and districts (BCDs) provided that local energy sources are exploited efficiently. Besides improving the energy efficiency by reducing energy consumption and improving the match between energy supply and demand, energy quality issues have become a key topic of interest. Energy quality management is a technique that aims at optimally utilizing the exergy content of various renewable energy sources. In addition to minimizing life-cycle CO2 emissions related to exergy losses of an energy system, issues such as system reliability should be addressed. The present work contributes to the research by proposing a novel multi-objective design optimization scheme that minimizes the global warming potential during the life-cycle and maximizes the exergy performance, while the maximum allowable level of the loss of power supply probability (LPSP) is predefined by the user as a constraint. The optimization makes use of Genetic Algorithm (GA). Finally, a case study is presented, where the above methodology has been applied to an office BCD located in Norway. The proposed optimization scheme is proven to be efficient in finding the optimal design and can be easily enlarged to encompass more relevant objective functions.