Ancillary Service Provision through HVAC Load Control in Building Clusters

This paper aims at development of the automated load control potential of buildings through control of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system to provide ancillary services to the grid. The power consumption of HVAC is optimized in response to the reference signals while ensuring maximum thermal comfort. Accordingly, a coordinated control strategy is developed to control the HVAC power consumption and charging/discharging cycles of energy storage. By variation of the set temperature within a user defined bandwidth, the HVAC is controlled to provide ancillary service to the grid. Similarly, battery energy storage system is controlled to respond to ancillary service request during limited HVAC control owing to user comfort satisfaction. Results reveal that proposed strategy for power sharing and coordinated load control is able to robustly mitigate power mismatches.