Abstract
The increasing distributed generation of renewable energy and alternative energy generation technologies is making it important to consider when and how buildings consume energy from a cost and sustainability perspective. If buildings can be flexible in their consumption patterns they can use the greenest and most efficient produced energy and help solve grid-side imbalances with cost benefits.
Building modelling and simulation can provide an effective method for evaluating flexibility opportunities in buildings. However, most building loads depend on the occupant presence and dynamic interactions between different building components. Therefore, occupant presence and different interactions have to be taken into account when developing the energy performance model and when evaluating the simulation results for flexibility. In particular, this is key in the retail sector which this paper considers as the case.
In this paper we present a detailed simulation model of a supermarket, evaluate different flexibility scenarios, and discuss the flexibility results in light of an ethnographic study of the work processes and the store operation.
Why this matters
Most building-flexibility studies model loads as if buildings ran themselves. Retail stores don’t: the freezer cycle interacts with restocking; the oven cycle interacts with the bake-fresh-bread schedule; the ventilation cycle interacts with cleaning. The contribution here is taking the ethnographic data into the EnergyPlus model so that simulated flexibility scenarios reflect what staff actually do, not what the BMS schedule says they do.
Citation
Jradi, M., Foldager, H. E., Jeppesen, R. C., Hviid, J., Rasmussen, M. A., & Kjærgaard, M. B. (2020). Modeling and Performance Simulation of a Retail Store as a Smart Grid Ready Building. In V. Corrado, E. Fabrizio, A. Gasparella, & F. Patuzzi (Eds.), Proceedings of Building Simulation 2019: 16th IBPSA International Conference and Exhibition (pp. 4070–4078). IBPSA. https://doi.org/10.26868/25222708.2019.210128