SPIA: Flexible Loads

Lead Performer: National Renewable Energy Laboratory – Golden, CO
DOE Total Funding: $200,000
Project Term: October 1, 2019 – September 30, 2020
Funding Type: Direct Funded

Project Objective

The project team will conduct a high-level stochastic analysis of the main value streams (including capacity, energy, and ancillary services) for building flexibility by leveraging the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) Standard Scenarios and the prototype Cambium tool. NREL’s Standard Scenarios provides an annually updated suite of U.S. power sector scenarios across numerous potential futures. Cambium is a new tool in development that provides hourly marginal electricity prices, emission rates, and net load profiles for a suite of future scenarios by assembling the Standard Scenario capacity expansion results and the PLEXOS production cost results together.

The analysis will hinge on defining generic flexible resources to be analyzed. These flexible resources will represent potential grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEB) that shift loads within a 24-hour window and will be chosen in collaboration with BTO and NREL’s building experts. The project team intends to lean heavily on the idea of aggregated generic building flexibility modeled as storage resources with time-varying availability and performance parameters, and a dissipative term when appropriate (e.g., for thermal storage-based flexibility). The project will investigate a range of sensitivities that look at different:

• Variable renewable energy penetration levels of up to 70% (RE penetration of 85%), driven by technology (e.g. wind, solar, storage) cost assumptions
• Natural gas prices
• Building flexibility features such as:
  • Charge/discharge efficiencies (e.g., round-trip efficiencies greater or smaller than 1)
  • Energy dissipation rates (e.g., 0 for load scheduling, proportional to 1/RC for thermostatically controlled loads)
  • Energy to power capacity ratios
  • Aggregate ramp rates
• Building flexibility diurnal availability across seasons (leaning on dsgrid, ResStock, and/or ComStock datasets to accurately define seasons for certain locations and building types)

The project team will develop a price-taker model to dispatch the generic flexible building resources against the time series prices and/or emission datasets from Cambium.

Project Impact

The price-taker model provides a good approximation of real-world operation of flexible buildings because it allows the flexible building operator to maximize value against cost and/or emissions metrics, assuming that the flexible building’s presence would not fundamentally change the characteristics of grid-provided energy. Using a price-taking model also frees up computational and analytical resources to probabilistically summarize the potential value of a broad range of flexibility types for all regions of the contiguous United States and for multiple temporal scales (e.g., monthly or seasonal; near-term, mid-term, and long-term).

Contacts

DOE Technology Manager: Erika Gupta
Lead Performer: Ella Zhou, National Renewable Energy Laboratory