English

This paper presents a comprehensive approach about energy resources management in buildings connected to the electricity grid and equipped with energy production and storage systems. The aim of the work is to find interesting configurations that favour energy self-consumption while minimizing the impact of the local production on the grid. Energy and economic criteria are proposed to evaluate the proposed strategy. A parametric study allowed the local systems to be optimally designed.

The capacity of intermittent power sources like wind and PV is steadily increasing. The existing balance between production and consumption is seriously affected by these new sources. Flexible demand for example in buildings is one solution to come back to a stable system. Buildings provide a huge potential for flexible electricity demand. This flexibility can be addressed by using model predictive control (MPC) with optimized scheduling for the buildings’ heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

The reliable assessment of the annual energy demand has become necessary in view of building energy performance certification. Accurate models must be used to simulate the behaviour of HVAC components in real operation, usually characterized by a wide variation of building loads. In this context, this paper deals with the development and validation of an algorithm aimed at the assessment of part load performance of various kinds of controls for vapour compresion based heat pumps and chillers, in particular referring to on-off, inverter-driven and multi-stage vapour compression.