<p>The decreasing cost of implementation and increasing regulatory incentive to lower energy use have led to an increased adoption of distributed energy resources in recent years. This increased adoption has been further fueled by a surge in energy consciousness and the expansion of energy-saving products and technologies. To lower reliance on the electrical grid and fully realize the benefits of distributed energy resources, many consumers have also elected to use battery systems to store generated energy. For owners of multiple buildings, or multiple owners willing to share the operational cost, building clusters may be formed to more effectively take advantage of these distributed resources and storage systems. The implementation of these systems in existing buildings introduces the question of what makes a “good” building cluster. Furthermore, the scalable nature of distributed energy sources and storage systems create countless possibilities for system configuration. Through comparison of unique two-building clusters from a stock of five buildings with a given distributed energy resource (in this case, a solar photovoltaic panel array) and energy storage system, we develop a fundamental understanding of the underlying factors that allow building clusters to be less reliant on the utility grid and make better use of energy generation and storage systems.</p>

Evaluation of Commercial Building Clusters With Energy Storage to Reduce Reliance on Electrical Utility Grids

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.