1. Architecting the Future: Exploring Coordinated Control Frameworks for Connected Communities
- Author
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Paul, lazlo, Pritoni, Marco, Regnier, Cynthia, MacDonald, Jason S, Brown, Richard, and Johnson, Cecilia
- Abstract
Connected communities are groups of grid-interactive efficient buildings able to worktogether to address grid challenges and building needs at a community level. They providegreater benefits than building-by-building approaches, optimizing multiple buildings to reducedistribution infrastructure capacity requirements, improve grid utilization of diverse energytechnologies, and create new value streams from buildings. Connected communities have beenidentified as an important part of decarbonizing the grid, particularly in their role to use demandflexibility to support greater degrees of variable renewable energy in the power supply.The DOE Connected Communities program selected 10 projects throughout the U.S. todemonstrate cutting edge connected communities approaches. These projects utilize diverseenergy technologies and include both residential and commercial buildings, retrofit and newconstruction, numbering in the tens to thousands per community. These projects are led bydiverse stakeholders driven by different use cases, including utilities, homebuilders, energyservice providers, universities, research organizations, and more.To enable community-scale benefits, these projects must have control mechanisms forcoordinating the operation of buildings and distributed energy resources such as generation andstorage. Several types of coordinated control architectures have evolved in the ConnectedCommunities program, influenced by the stakeholder use case, existing market conditions, andthe types of building and energy resources integrated. This paper describes these architectures, aswell as their use cases, benefits, and challenges they face during their implementation. Thefindings can support scalability of community-scale coordinated energy systems by clarifyingtradeoffs in their design for utilities, control vendors, and developers.
- Published
- 2024