Smart Home HVAC Digital Twin ML Meta-Model for Electric Power Distribution Systems With Solar PV and CTA-2045 Controls

Abstract

Building modeling, specifically heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) load and equivalent energy storage calculations, represent a key focus for decarbonization of buildings and smart grid controls. In this paper, an ultra-fast one-minute resolution Hybrid Machine Learning Model (HMLM) is proposed as part of a novel contribution in the field of residential physics-based smart home surrogate modeling. Emulation of white box models, or digital twins, with editable parameters through machine learning (ML) meta-modeling serves as an alternative to wide-spread experimental Big Data collection. The HMLM employs combined k-means clustering with multiple linear regression (MLR) to emulate minutely HVAC power timestep-to-timestep with satisfactory nRMSE error of less than 10% across an entire year test set. An approach is also described to characterize HVAC systems as generalized storage (GES) devices to unify household appliance and virtual power plant (VPP) controls in accordance with industry Communication Technology Association (CTA) 2045 protocol and Energy Star metrics. Synthetic output data from experimentally calibrated EnergyPlus models for three existing smart homes managed by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is employed in residential case studies and a discussion provided for the large-scale application to hundreds of homes.