I-DREEM: Impact of Demand Response on Short- and Long-Term Measures of Building Efficiency

This project employs a two-pronged approach to assess the impact of demand response (DR) on energy efficiency. The first approach assesses the impacts of DR on long-term energy-efficiency trends by using a combination of a) whole-building, electric load data that corresponds to baseline and demand-response operations with b) energy-efficiency audits from over 10,000 buildings in Northern California. This builds on previous inferences drawn from a small collection of buildings that found that as buildings become more energy efficient, their demand-response potential declines, even though implementing demand response strategies in buildings generally improves their efficiency in the long run.

The second approach will assess the energy-efficiency implications of load shifting for grid ancillary services that occur on timescales of real-time market participation to non-spinning reserve (i.e., shifting energy on timescales of 5 to 30 minutes) on building energy consumption on multiple buildings at the University of Michigan and SLAC campuses. This data collection and analysis will provide the basis to explore the long-term efficiency implications of load shifting, which are expected to be different than those associated with load shedding.

Project Impact

This experimental work is expected to advance the understanding of underlying mechanisms that lead to energy-use inefficiencies in buildings. It should also inform the development of better building models that can capture these phenomena accurately. Together, these advances should allow the building community to design building controls for grid services that mitigate inefficiencies and quantify the energy 'cost' of building system control. Currently, the state-of-the-art approaches assume that pure load shifting incurs no energy 'cost,' but these results will allow researchers to quantify that cost so that buildings could potentially be seen in the energy marketplace as energy storage options.