Americans spend 87% of our time indoors. Each year, energy used in buildings costs us nearly as much as the U.S. military budget. Our buildings use 40% of our energy, and emit more carbon than the combined economies of Japan, France, and the U.K. Better building controls could improve comfort, save money, and reduce emissions.
Improving building controls is also a crucial step toward modernizing our power grid, since buildings consume 72% of U.S. electricity. Today’s power system operators balance the grid by controlling generators to match demand. As we integrate more wind and solar power, however, we lose supply-side flexibility. Thankfully, loads like air conditioners, refrigerators, water heaters, and electric cars are potentially flexible. In aggregate, these loads are an enormous, untapped resource. Better building controls could unlock this resource, enabling a grid where demand is coordinated to match random, renewable generation.
Furthermore, electrification of the heating sector presents unprecedented challenges and opportunities in grid-interactive efficient buildings. EERL is developing heat pump control and aggregation strategies and tapping the potential of thermal energy storage towards a sustainable heating system.
Publications
Lee, Z. E. and Zhang, K. M. Scalable identification and control of residential heat pumps: A minimal hardware approach. Applied Energy, In press.
Kircher, K. J. and Zhang, K. M. Heat purchase agreements could lower barriers to heat pump adoption, Applied Energy, Accepted.
Sun, Q., Lee, Z. E., Li, Z., Zhang, K. M., Yang P., Wang, J. Thermodynamic and Economic Analysis of a Novel Solar-Assisted Ground Source Absorption Heat Pump System, Journal of Energy Engineering, Accepted.
Kircher, K. J., Schaefer, W. and Zhang, K. M. A computationally efficient, high-fidelity testbed for building climate control, Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities, 2:011002-1, 2021
Zachary E. Lee, Qingxuan Sun, Zhao Ma, Jiangfeng Wang, Jason S. MacDonald, K. Max Zhang. “Providing Grid Services with Heat Pumps: A Review“, Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities, 1(1): 011007, 2020
Zachary E. Lee, Kartikay Gupta, Kevin J. Kircher and K. Max Zhang. “Mixed-Integer Model Predictive Control of Variable-Speed Heat Pumps.” Energy and Buildings 198: 75-83, 2019.
Kircher, K. J. and Zhang, K. M. On the Lumped Capacitance Approximation Accuracy in RC Network Building Models. Energy and Buildings 108: 454-462, 2015
Palacio, S. N.; Kircher, K. J.; Zhang, K. M, On the Feasibility of Providing Power System Spinning Reserves from Thermal Storage, Energy and Buildings 104: 131-138, 2015
Kircher, K. J.; Zhang, K. M. Economic Model Predictive Control of Thermal Storage for Demand Response, American Control Conference, Chicago, IL, July 2015
Palacio, S. N.; Valentine, K. F.; Wong, M.; Zhang, K. M. Reducing power system costs with thermal energy storage. Applied Energy 2014, 129, 228-237
