IEEE Electrification - December 2022 - 40

residential pool pumps is about 77 GW
of power and 90 GWh of energy (Kalsi,
2017). This virtual battery capacity is
significant if it can be tapped to provide
grid services.
Automated Grid Services
Using BTM Assets
For many commercial buildings that
are subjected to traditional utility rate
structures, utilities charge not only
for the energy (kilowatthour) consumed
but also for the peak power
(kilowatt) demand. The peak is calculated
as a rolling 15- or 30-min average
during a billing cycle (typically
30 days). The electricity consumption
in commercial buildings typically
peaks for a short duration one or more
times during a day. A portion of the peak can be avoided
by managing BTM DERs without sacrificing service levels.
However, to benefit from reduced demand charges, the
peak must be managed every day of the billing cycle. The
use of BTM DERs for utility demand response is not a
new concept. In some regions of the United States, aggregators
have used BTM DERs to provide capacity relief for
more than two decades. However, many of these deployments
are either direct load control or highly customized,
making them difficult to scale. Large-scale participation
of BTM DERs requires a highly scalable deployment. One
of the attributes of scalable deployment is highly automated
application.
ILC and TCC are two complementary automated technologies
that can be used to manage BTM DERs. Although
the goal of both technologies is to manage building electricity
consumption to reduce cost and support electric
grid reliability, the approaches used to achieve this goal
are different. While ILC was designed to serve the current
utility needs and serve as a bridge toward the future, TCC
is more forward looking and is a natural choice in a transactive
energy environment. ILC can be used to support the
following grid service use cases: 1) peak load management
(PLM), 2) time of use (TOU), 3) real-time pricing (RTP), 4)
critical peak pricing (CPP), 5) capacity bidding, and 6)
event-driven demand response.
ILC
The ILC application is used to provide grid services by
managing BTM-controllable DERs while mitigating service-level
excursions (e.g., occupant comfort, lighting comfort,
minimizing equipment on/off cycling) by dynamically
prioritizing available DERs for curtailment using both
quantitative (thedeviation of zone conditions from the set
point) and qualitative criteria (e.g., the type of zone). This
application uses a business decision-making process to
prioritize DERs to generate a numerical score to prioritize
40
IEEE Electrification Magazine / DECEMBER 2022
While ILC was
designed to serve
the current utility
needs and serve as
a bridge toward the
future, TCC is more
forward looking and
is a natural choice in
a transactive energy
environment.
each alternative load based on associated
decision criteria.
Although the ILC process supports
several grid service use cases, all use
cases result in the generation of a
building-level peak demand target (or
goal) for ILC to manage. ILC decomposes
the problems into a hierarchy of
the elements influencing a system by
incorporating three levels, as shown
in Figure 2: the goal, criteria, and alternatives
of a decision. The ILC process
prioritizes a set of criteria used to
rank the alternatives of a decision
and distinguish, in general, the more
important factors from the less im -
portant factors. Pairwise comparison
judgments are made with respect to
the attributes of one hierarchy level
given the attribute of the next level up, from the main criteria
to the subcriteria.
To illustrate the ILC approach for managing the peak
electricity demand, we use a building that has a set of
RTUs, as shown in Figure 2. Load management options
are determined by comparing alternatives with respect to
a set of criteria. The goal is to generate the dynamic load
curtailment priority of individual RTUs for managing
building electricity consumption to a target level. In this
example, five decision criteria are used to manage building
electricity consumption without significantly affecting
occupant comfort. Additional criteria can be easily added,
or existing criteria can be modified or removed. For a
decision criterion to be effective, it must be able to capture
important characteristics that have a direct impact
on control. In this example, four quantitative criteria and
one qualitative criterion (the type of zone) are used.
First, a pairwise comparison is conducted to qualitatively
determine which criteria are more important and
then assign a weight to each criterion. The last layer in Figure
2 consists of different decision alternatives, which are
multiple RTUs that can be controlled to manage the building
energy consumption to the desired target. The ILC process
selects RTUs with the highest priority level that can
be curtailed for the longest duration of time without a
comfort penalty during the event period. A more detailed
description of the ILC process is provided by Kim and Katipamula
(2017). It was deployed for testing and validation
on buildings with PLM, RTP, and capacity bidding use
cases. In these tests, ILC was able to successfully control
several DERs, such as RTUs, variable air volume (VAV)
boxes, dimmable lighting fixtures, etc. to achieve the necessary
objectives.
TCC
Dynamic utility rates (the TOU, CPP, and RTP) and
demand-response programs (e.g., capacity bidding) are
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