Managing Smart Grids Using Price Responsive Smart Buildings

The market is a tool used to efficiently allocate resources. Energy markets have been used to allocate generation and transmission resources at the level of the transmission and distribution system, with significant innovation on these markets occurring since deregulation in the 1990s. The advent of the Smart Grid and Smart Building have enabled these innovations to be brought to the level of the retail electricity market, where even individual buildings will be able to adjust their consumption based on price signals from the market. This paper gives a review of the development of energy markets and the technologies of the Smart Grid and Smart Building that are enabling their participation in the market at the edge of the grid. The OpenADR communication protocol is examined as a means of communicating price information between the load and the utility. Finally, a hardware-in-the-loop Smart Building test setup is described. This test setup is used to compare the performance of baseline and price responsive controls, with a power reduction of 60% achieved during a period of peak consumption and grid congestion corresponding to a large price surge.