Adaptive building load control to enable high penetration of solar photovoltaic generation

This paper investigates the use of a collection of dispatchable heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) loads to absorb the slow (low-frequency) fluctuations in solar photovoltaic (PV) generation. We find the optimal number of aggregated HVAC loads that offset fluctuations in PV power using power-frequency analysis. To guarantee quality of service, in a fleet of residential/commercial buildings, a quadratic optimization problem is formulated to compute the optimal schedule for a given set of HVAC loads, while maintaining occupants comfort and PV generation constraints. The proposed mechanism not only minimizes the tracking error between PV generation and total consumption, but also significantly reduces the capacity of the required energy storage devices (ESD) such as batteries and fly-wheels. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism is able to achieve good PV tracking performance as well as obtain a minimal ESD capacity. We show that most of the renewable generation can be consumed locally through an intelligent coordination of HVAC loads that minimizes the impact on the grid and reduces the need for large capacity of ESD.