Seventh working meeting

A seventh working meeting took place in Montreal, Canada on October 10th-12th, 2018. The meeting was attended by 34 participants from 12 countries. The meeting was hosted by Polytechnique Montréal.

The main part of the meeting was used to focus on defining the content and authors of the Annex 67 Deliverables. Compared to the original plans the number of deliverables was reduced by one as two deliverables were merged. Due to the work of the annex, the content of the deliverables have changed, which has let to slightly new titles that better express the content of the deliverables. The deliverables from Annex 67 will be:

• Principles of Energy Flexible Buildings
• Characterization of Energy Flexibility in Buildings
• Stakeholders’ perspective on energy flexible buildings
• Control strategies and algorithms for obtaining energy flexibility in buildings
• Experimental facilities and methods for assessing energy flexibility in buildings
• Examples of Energy Flexibility in buildings
• Project Summary Report

Many other publications (reports, articles, papers and a calculation tool) may already now be found on annex67.org/Publications

During the Annex 67 project a generic characterization methodology for energy flexibility has been developed – see Annex 67 Newsletter no. 4. For energy flexible systems (e.g. a building) that are controlled to react to a penalty signal (e.g. price), the methodology defines flexibility characteristics derived from the response of a system to a step change in the penalty signal or a temporal penalty signal varying over the year. Two approaches have been introduced in the Annex to compute the flexibility characteristics: a data-driven approach whereby system identification techniques are used to identify the response function based on time series data of the system output (e.g. energy use) and the penalty signal; and a simulation-based approach whereby the flexibility characteristics are derived from simulating the system response to respectively a flat penalty and a step penalty.

By means of common exercises and an intensive “sprint week”, annex participants have put the developed methodology to a series of tests to evaluate its applicability and sensitivity to boundary conditions, shape and size of the penalty signal, initial conditions, etc. The focus was on the simulation-based approach. While showing significant dependence of the flexibility characteristics to these circumstantial variables and the ability of the method to reflect this dependence for specific buildings, the study concluded that given a precise description of the calculation procedure, the methodology could be applied for inter-building comparison as well.

An Excel tool for providing a standardized way for communicating results from the two approaches of the methodology (data driven or simulation based) has been developed.