Energy Management for Building Climate Comfort in Uncertain Smart Thermal Grids with Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage

In this paper, we present an energy management framework for building climate comfort systems that are interconnected in a grid via aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) systems in the presence of two types of uncertainty namely private and common uncertainty sources. The ATES system is considered as a large-scale storage system that can be a heat source or sink, or a storage for thermal energy While the private uncertainty source refers to uncertain thermal energy demand of individual buildings, the common uncertainty source describes the uncertain common resource pool (ATES) between neighbors. To this end, we develop a large-scale uncertain coupled dynamical model to predict the thermal energy imbalance in a network of interconnected building climate comfort systems together with mutual interactions between the local ATES systems. A finite-horizon mixed-integer quadratic optimization problem with multiple chance constraints is formulated at each sampling time, which is in general a non-convex problem and hard to solve. We then provide a computationally tractable framework based on an extension to the so-called robust randomized approach which offers a less conservative solution for a problem with multiple chance constraints. A simulation study is provided to compare two different configurations, namely: completely decoupled, and centralized solutions.