Commercial

Physical building models can enhance our understanding of building energy use, peak demand and assist in estimating the DR potential in commercial buildings, especially pre-cooling as a DR strategy. Entering building geometry and equipment information into the current energy simulation tools is time consuming and tedious. Demand Response Quick Assessment Tool was developed as an alternative and provides simplified building models and pre-determined building systems to evaluate the effectiveness of pre-cooling strategies without going through a detailed simulation exercise, but merely allowing the users to change a few important parameters. This project supports the further development of the DRQAT tool for evaluating demand reduction and cost saving in large commercial buildings as well as its use in actual field tests for both developing DR strategies and revisions of the tool.

The goal of this project is to develop methods to evaluate load shapes in commercial buildings. The study discusses and compares current methods of summarizing and analyzing electric load shapes. Simple rules of thumb for graphical display of load shapes are suggested. We propose a set of parameters that can be used to describe quantitatively the load shape in many buildings. Using the example of a linear regression model to predict load shape from time and temperature, we show how quantities such as the load’s sensitivity to outdoor temperature, and the effectiveness of demand response (DR), can be quantified. Examples are presented using real building data.

The objective of this study was to identify the potential of dimmable lighting for providing regulation capacity and contingency reserves if massively-deployed throughout the State. We found that one half of the total electric lighting load in the California commercial sector is bottled up in larger buildings that are greater an 50,000 square feet. Retrofitting large California buildings with dimmable lighting to enable fast DR lighting would require an investment of about $1.8 billion and a “fleet” of about 56 million dimming ballasts. By upgrading the existing installed base of lighting and controls (primarily in large commercial facilities) a substantial amount of ancillary services could be provided. Though not widely deployed, today’s state-of-the art lighting systems, control systems and communication networks could be used for this application. The same lighting control equipment that is appropriate for fast DR is also appropriate for achieving energy efficiency with lighting on a daily basis. Thus fast DR can leverage the capabilities that are provided by a conventional dimming lighting control system. If dimmable lighting were massively deployed throughout large California buildings (because mandated by law, for example) dimmable lighting could realistically supply 380 MW of non-spinning reserve, 47% of the total non-spinning reserves needed in 2007.