Distributionally Robust Demand Response for Heterogeneous Buildings with Rooftop Renewables under Cold Climates

Abstract

A considerable penetration of rooftop PV generation and increasing demand for heating loads will enlarge the peak-to-valley difference, imposing a great challenge to the reliable operation of distribution systems under cold climates. The objective of this paper is to establish a distributionally robust demand response (DR) model for building energy systems for suppressing peak-to-valley load ratios by exploiting cooperative complementarity and flexible transformation characteris-tics of various household appliances. The thermodynamic effect of buildings is modeled for harvesting intermittent renewable energy sources (RESs) on the building roof in the form of thermal energy storages to reduce RES curtailments and eliminate thermal comfort violations in cold weather. Furthermore, the Wasserstein metric is adopted to develop the ambiguity set of the uncertainty probability distributions (PDs) of RESs, and thus, only historical data of RES output is needed rather than prior knowledge about the actual PDs. Finally, a computationally tractable mixed-integer linear programming reformulation is derived for the original distributionally robust optimization (DRO) model. The proposed DRO-based DR strategy was performed on multiple buildings over a 24 h scheduling horizon, and comparative studies have validated the effectiveness of the proposed strategy for building energy systems in reducing the peak/valley ratio and decreasing operation costs.

Keywords

• building energy system
• demand response
• distributionally robust optimization
• cold climate
• rooftop solar photovoltaic