To Cope with the Uncertainty in Smart Energy Systems: Office Buildings as a Source for Energy Flexibility

Electricity energy generation and its supply through electricity networks is mainly organized in a top-down, centralized manner. Energy consumption can be predicted quite accurately at a high level, and this forms the basis for pre-scheduling the production by large power plants. Only few actors are involved in the generation, trade, and transportation of electricity, but this is changing rapidly. Renewable energy conversion (such as wind and solar energy, geothermal energy or as supplied by biomass systems at farms) will lead to a large amount of distributed and fluctuating (small) renewable energy sources throughout the grid, at homes, farms, and companies. The need of centralized electricity generation thus becomes more difficult to plan. This can lead to large problems and unstable electricity grids and therefore we have to develop approaches to deal with this increasing uncertainty. The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Control Technology (CT) will provide us many options for stabilizing electricity networks. Besides this also on the demand side new consumers such as electric vehicles and heat pumps (with large demand but also high flexibility or storage capacity) appear. The increasing share of decentralized renewable energy conservation in combination with the new types of consumers will drastically alter the operation of electricity systems. Smart Grids are developed by all major electricity distribution companies together with industry to cope with the dispersed electricity production by matching of supply and demand by smart ICT and CT. The future stricter sustainability demands will lead to offices with their own renewable energy sources and energy storage capacity. Office buildings will become a potential source of energy flexibility which can be offered to the grid as a Virtual Power Plant (VPP). In order to minimize uncertainty in the balance between energy supply and demand it is necessary to develop realistic user behavior, installations behavior and Smart Grid interaction. Monitoring the needs and preferences of users is necessary to predict future states of the demand for the SES (e.g. based on weather forecasts and user behavior). Automated prosumer support is needed to optimize interaction between offices and Smart grid.