Robust Provision of Frequency Reserves by Office Building Aggregations

Active participation of demand-side resources in power system control tasks, i.e., demand response, is expected to facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources in the grid. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical control scheme to enable provision of frequency control reserves by a pool of office buildings managed by an aggregator. The reserves are provided by controlling the consumption of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in a robust way. The aggregator determines once a day the optimal amount of reserves and its allocation among the participants. On the building level, a robust MPC controller optimizes the HVAC system consumption every 15 minutes, and a proportional controller provides the reserves in real-time. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme in simulations considering different buildings and reserve product characteristics. The results show that office building aggregations can provide large amounts of frequency reserves in a robust way, while satisfying occupants’ comfort and respecting privacy.