Scheduling and Control of Flexible Building Loads for Grid Services based on a Virtual Battery Model

This paper presents a framework for modeling, scheduling, and controlling residential thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) to provide multiple grid services, such as energy shifting, peak load reduction, and ancillary services. A modeling method is proposed to characterize aggregate flexibility from heterogeneous TCLs using a virtual battery model. Based on the flexibility model, a multi-period optimal scheduling formulation is developed to best utilize the flexibility from building loads and maximize total benefits from stacked value streams. An algorithm is proposed to control individual devices to follow the desired power consumption in real-time. The proposed methods are illustrated and validated through simulations.