Abstract
Retail stores use a considerable amount of energy. Therefore, this type of building is important to consider for providing demand-side flexibility services. However, existing work on demand-side flexibility has only considered narrow aspects of the loads and opportunities in retail buildings.
This paper details a study on the loads and practices in different types of retail stores, as well as the flexibility potential. Four different retail store types were inspected, catalogued, and analysed together with their energy usage. The results highlight that large percentages of the store loads are too diverse to group into usable categories. The usual categories are present, like Lighting, Frost, Cooling, Comfort Cooling, Ventilation, and one less common group: Ovens.
In the supermarket screened, the ovens took up 60% of the flexibility potential and about 19% of the Hypermarket’s potential. Flexibility potential numbers are detailed, as well as the current ability to control the loads. Retail stores are different from other sectors in regards to their motivations for upgrading installations. Some of the notable requirements, potential challenges, and barriers to realising the flexibility potential are highlighted in relation to these motivations.
In conclusion, the current state of the controllable devices and the granularity with which they can be controlled are found to be lacking severely, if they are to be integrated in a modern demand response system. As retail stores are regularly renovated, an opportunity exists to introduce required technologies across stores at a faster pace than in other building types, if a business case exists.
Methodology
Four store types surveyed: hypermarket (5,000–15,000 m²), supermarket (1,000–5,000 m²), garden center, and hard goods store. The screening combined manual observations, BMS schedules, a year of metering data, and consultation with store managers and equipment manufacturers – producing a per-device map of consumption, control surface, and DR mobilisation potential.
Why this matters
This paper is the empirical foundation for everything that follows in Jakob’s PhD work. The headline finding – that loads are diverse and hard to bucket, and that current control infrastructure is the binding constraint – frames the rest of the research programme around making the control infrastructure portable, abstractable, and cheap to deploy.
Citation
Hviid, J., & Kjærgaard, M. B. (2018). The Retail Store as a Smart Grid Ready Building: Current Practice and Future Potentials. In Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Power & Energy Society Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT), pp. 1–5. IEEE Press. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISGT.2018.8403354