An occupant-centric demand response strategy with the minimum sacrifice of thermal comfort in an office building case

In recent years, demand side measures have been increasingly considered to improve the reliability and overall energy efficiency of power systems. Demand response (DR) is an effective method to achieve the flexible energy use in building field. Among many DR strategies in buildings, the global temperature adjustment (GTA) strategy is simple and effective. However, the traditional GTA strategy ignores the personnel distribution in different spaces during DR hours, resulting in a high reduction of thermal comfort in the building. This study proposes a new temperature adjustment strategy based on actual personnel distribution which is called Occupant-centric temperature adjustment (OTA) strategy and takes a high DR potential study case with more than 50% of cumulative daily cooling load reduction. Then, this study evaluates the optimization of OTA strategy to traditional GTA strategy in three dimensions: DR potential, thermal comfort, and economy. Results show that in the high DR potential case, OTA strategy can increase the DR potential of 2.3%, the thermal comfort of 2.7%, and the cost savings of 0.8% per day compared to GTA strategy. Finally, this study takes a low DR potential study case with less than 14% of cumulative daily cooling load reduction. The Results show that OTA strategy also can optimize the GTA strategy in thermal comfort and economy dimensions in the case. However, OTA strategy can optimize the GTA strategy more effective in high DR potential case.