A generalized load management gateway coupling smart buildings to the grid

Buildings are currently largely passive participants in the electric grid. As functional and residential buildings are responsible for a sizeable share of energy consumption in the industrialized world, use in demand side management schemes is a promising area in a future smart power grid. As each individual building, especially in the residential sector, offers only limited load shifting potential and associated financial gain, acceptance of demand response programs that require manual user interaction is unlikely. Instead, schemes based on automatic control are a viable alternative. This paper proposes a building agent, which acts as load management gateway, autonomously managing a building as a single unit, utilizing load models on one hand and a generic communication scheme that avoids close coupling of building and grid on the other hand. The agent manipulates the consumption profile of the building in a way, which matches the demands of the smart grid and offers the resulting load shifting potential to the grid.