Abstract
The transition to green energy is imposing new requirements on the energy sector, such as managing an energy flow through the system that is significantly less predictable than traditional energy sources. Technologies like demand response (DR) can help influence the consumer’s energy use, but is costly to implement, often to a degree that vastly overshadows the benefits for the consumer and grid operator. Reducing initial investment cost for deployments is, therefore, a considerable factor for the success of DR.
One approach to DR is using building operating systems (BOS) to facilitate the functionality. This paper seeks to reduce the cost of deployments of BOSes, for demand response purposes, by creating the tooling needed for automatic configuration of BOS services. Building on top of an existing BOS, tooling is created to support services from the first introduction into the BOS environment, to the exposure of its functionality to the rest of the system, effectively supporting service discovery and publication at runtime.
The tooling is evaluated based on how it impacts the BOS ecosystem, but also the business ecosystem around a BOS. Results show that the tooling requires only minor changes to existing services, and that adding new services to the BOS, using the new tooling, can be achieved with little effort compared to traditional installation methods in the ecosystem. Also, shifting implementation complexity and cost from entrepreneurs to application developers, allows for reducing costs significantly, as application developers target multiple buildings for each implementation. The addition of the new tooling allows the them to potentially create new markets and products.
Why this matters
Retail stores in Denmark typically work with an ROI horizon of about 3 years, while DR deployment costs need to be amortised across many sites to be viable. This paper attacks the deployment cost term in that calculation: instead of every new service requiring per-site configuration, the BOS itself does the discovery and publication work. The result reframes who pays the integration cost (application developers, once) vs who used to (every building, every time).
Citation
Hviid, J., Johansen, A., Sangogboye, F. C., & Kjærgaard, M. B. (2019). Enabling auto-configuring building services: The road to affordable portable applications for smart grid integration. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy ’19), pp. 68–77. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3307772.3328288