Energy Flexible Buildings

Overview

Energy flexibility in buildings will play an important role in facilitating energy systems based entirely on renewable energy sources. Flexibility is necessary to control the energy use to match the actual energy generation from various energy sources such as solar and wind power. However, before this project there was a lack of comprehensive knowledge about how much energy flexibility different building types and their usage may be able to offer to the future energy systems.

This project has demonstrated how energy flexibility in buildings can provide generating capacity for energy grids, and has identifed critical aspects and possible solutions to manage such flexibility. This knowledge is important in order to incorporate energy flexibility of buildings into future smart energy systems and to better accommodate renewable sources in energy systems. It is also important when developing the business case for using building energy flexibility within future systems to potentially reduce costly upgrades of energy distribution grids.

The project objectives were as follows:

• development of common terminology, a definition of ‘energy flexibility in buildings’ and a classification method,
• investigation of user comfort, motivation and acceptance associated with the introduction of energy flexibility in buildings,
• investigation of the energy flexibility potential in different buildings and contexts, and development of design guidelines, control strategies and algorithms
• investigation of the aggregated energy flexibility of buildings and the potential effect on energy grids, and
• demonstration of energy flexibility through experimental and field studies.