Optimal Operation of Commercial Buildings with Generalized Demand Response Management

With the development of smart grid technology, each entity in a power system, from power sources to end users, could have more intensive interactions with some others. In this paper, flexible loads and emerging concentrating solar power (CSP) plants are considered as generalized demand response resources and dispatched cooperatively to mitigate the problem of insufficient power supply during peak load periods. Numerous commercial buildings have great potential to provide dispatching flexibility for a power system through generalized demand response management. Given this background, an optimal operation model is presented with an objective of minimizing the total operational cost of a given commercial building with a CSP plant, a heat pump, inflexible loads, electric vehicles (EVs), lighting systems and air conditioners included. A highly efficient solver YALMIP is next utilized in the MATLAB environment to solve the developed optimization model. Finally, an office building is employed to demonstrate the proposed optimal operation model.