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Energy-Efcient Buildings Facilitated by Microgrid

Xiaohong Guan, Fellow, IEEE, Zhanbo Xu, and Qing-Shan Jia, Member, IEEE
AbstractRecent research shows that 20%30% of building energy consumption can be saved through optimized operation and management without changing the building structure and the hardware conguration of the energy supply system. Therefore, there is a huge potential for building energy savings through efcient operation. Microgrid technology provides an opportunity and a desirable infrastructure for improving the efciency of energy consumption in buildings. The key to improve building energy efciency in operation is to coordinate and optimize the operation of various energy sources and loads. In this paper, the scheduling problem of building energy supplies is considered with the practical background of a low energy building. The objective function is to minimize the overall cost of electricity and natural gas for a building operation over a time horizon while satisfying the energy balance and complicated operating constraints of individual energy supply equipment and devices. The uncertainties are captured and their impact is analyzed by the scenario tree method. Numerical testing is performed with the data of the pilot low energy building. The testing results show that signicant energy cost savings can be achieved through integrated scheduling and control of various building energy supply sources. It is very important to fully utilize solar energy and optimize the operation of electrical storage. It is also shown that precooling is a simple way to achieve energy savings. Index TermsEnergy saving, integrated building control, mixed integer programming.

Fig. 1. Energy system of buildings.

I. INTRODUCTION NERGY CRISIS worldwide is one of the most serious challenges facing the sustainable development of human society in the 21st century. Among the various ways to resolve or alleviate energy crisis, improving efciency in industrial, commercial and residential energy consumption is the most effective and the least controversial one. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, about 40% of total energy is consumed
Manuscript received September 12, 2010; accepted September 14, 2010. Date of current version November 19, 2010. This work was supported in part by the Tsinghua-UTC Research Institute for Integrated Building Energy, Safety and Control System, and the United Technologies Research Center, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 60921003, Grant 60736027, Grant 90924001, and Grant 60704008, in part by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2008AA01Z415, in part by the Program of Introducing Talents of Disciplines to Universities (the National 111 International Collaboration Project, B06002), and in part by the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education uder Grant 20070003110. Paper no. TSG-00128-2010. X. Guan is with the SKLMS Lab and MOE KLINNS Lab of Xian Jiaotong University, Xian 710049, China, and also with the Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CFINS), TNLIST, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: xhguan@xjtu.edu.cn). Z. Xu is with the SKLMS Lab and MOE KLINNS Lab of Xian Jiaotong University, Xian 710049, China (e-mail: zbxu@sei.xjtu.edu.cn). Q.-S. Jia is with the Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CFINS), TNLIST, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: jiaqs@tsinghua. edu.cn). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TSG.2010.2083705

in buildings in industrialized countries, among which 68% is electricity [1], [2]. Recent research shows that 20%30% of building energy consumption can be saved through optimized operation and management without changing the structure and hardware conguration of the building energy supply system. Therefore, there is a huge potential for building energy savings through efcient operation and management. Many efforts have been made to improve building energy efciency. One of the focuses is on improving building materials and structures to save energy consumption [8]. Increasing efciency of HVAC systems by natural ventilation with the information of outdoor environment is investigated in [1], [5]. Energy efciency of the lighting system can be improved by increasing the utilization ratio of sunlight [6]. Mooney et al. demonstrated the potential energy savings by utilizing renewable energy resources and distributed storage devices [2], [7]. Sun and Luh showed that the integrated terminal control and HVAC system can save energy signicantly while satisfying occupant comfort requirements [9]. Microgrid technology provides an opportunity and a desirable infrastructure for improving the efciency of energy consumption in buildings [3], [4], [18], [19]. As shown in Fig. 1, a typical microgrid for buildings integrates the operation of electrical and thermal energy supply and demand. The supply may include energy sources from distribution grid, autonomous power generators such as fuel cells, combined heat and power (CHP) systems, renewable energy resources such as PV solar cells and wind powers, and energy storage devices such as batteries and water tanks. Dictated by the requirements of occupant comfort, data processing, etc., the typical electrical demands or loads include those for HVAC, lighting, elevators, and IT data centers. The key to improve operation efciency of building energy consumption is to coordinate and optimize the operation of various energy sources and loads. However, there are many challenges and difculties that need to be addressed. First, the operation of different equipment and the devices of different types of energy supplies, electrical and thermal, such as CHP and renewable generating units, are coupled and need to be well coor-

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dinated. The operation of energy supply and controllable loads are also coupled in time and need to coordinate along time due to electrical and thermal storage devices. Second, it is well known that renewable energy resources such as PV panels and wind power are subject to large random uctuations. The high uncertainties in both supply and demand may cause major difculties in scheduling and control. Furthermore, the lighting demand and comfort requirements related to dynamic occupant movements and human behaviors are also subject to signicant uncertainties. The aforementioned two difculties make the integrated building operation problem very challenging. In this paper, the scheduling problem of building energy supplies is considered with the practical background of a low energy building. The objective function is to minimize the overall cost of electricity and natural gas for building operation over a time horizon while satisfying the energy balance and complicated operating constraints of individual energy supply equipment and devices. The electrical and thermal demand proles are assumed to be determined from the related work [9] and forecasted from the historical data. The uncertainties in demand and renewable energy sources are also considered. The above scheduling problem is formulated with power grid, solar PV panels, one CHP unit, and one electrical battery as energy sources and HVAC and lighting as demands, and solved as a mixed integer programming problem. The scheduling problem is then solved by the CPLEX solver. The uncertainties and their impact are captured and analyzed by the scenario tree method. Numerical testing is performed with the data of the pilot low energy building. The testing results show that signicant energy cost savings can be achieved through integrated scheduling and control of various building energy supply sources. It is very important to fully utilize the solar energy and optimize the operation of electrical storage. It is also shown that precooling operation during the time periods with low electrical energy prices is a simple way to achieve energy savings. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II, the mathematical problem formulation is presented. In Section III, the scheduling problem is approximated by a mixed integer programming and scenario tree method. In Section IV, the performance of the mixed integer programming is demonstrated on a typical summer day in Beijing. The value of accurate information on the demand and renewable energy sources are also discussed. Some discussions are included in Section V. A brief conclusion is shown in Section VI. II. PROBLEM FORMULATION The focus of this paper is on the integrated scheduling of the multiple energy supply sources to meet the demand. The energy supply sources include power grid, solar PV panels, battery, and CHP unit. The scheduling horizon is with discretized time periods. The objective is to minimize the overall energy cost of electricity and natural gas over the entire scheduling horizon with the time-of-use (TOU) electricity prices. The electrical and thermal load proles are assumed to be known by the control strategy of the building terminal units in the related work [9] and forecasts from the historical data. To simplify presentation, the problem is rst formulated as deterministic and the uncertainties are discussed in Section III.

To facilitate the problem formulation, the following notation is introduced. Time period index, . Period span (in hour). Power from the grid at (in kW). Solar generation at (in kW). Battery charge or discharge at (in kW). CHP generation at (in kW). Cooling quantity supplied by CHP unit at (in kWh). Volume of natural gas used by CHP unit at (in m ). State of charge (SOC) of battery at . The lower bound of SOC. Electrical load rate of CHP unit at , (dened as the ratio between power supply and the capacity). Minimal electrical load rate of CHP unit. Maximal electrical load rate of CHP unit. Electrical energy supply price at (in RMB/kWh). Electrical energy price fed into power grid at (in RMB/kWh). Total cost of electrical energy at (in RMB). Natural gas price at RMB/m ). (in

Total cost of natural gas at (in RMB). Electrical energy consumption of HVAC system at (in kWh). Electrical energy consumption of lighting at (in kWh). Electrical energy consumption of fresh air unit (FAU) and fan coil unit (FCU) at (in kWh). Total cooling demand at (in kWh). Quantity of grid energy supply at (in kWh). Quantity of solar energy at (in kWh).

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Quantity of battery energy charge (positive) or discharge (negative) at (in kWh). Quantity of CHP energy delivery at (in kWh). Capacity of battery (in kWh). Electrical energy consumption of critical loads (in kWh). Maximal battery charge (in kW). Maximal battery discharge (in kW). Minimal battery charge (in kW). Minimal battery discharge (in kW). Electrical capacity of CHP unit (in kW). Rated natural gas ow rate of CHP unit (26.9 kJ/Nm ). The ratio of the consumed natural gas ow rate to the rated ow rate of CHP unit at . The cooling power supplied by CHP unit at (in kW). COP Coefcient of performance.

b) Cost of electricity and natural gas 1) cost of electricity:

(5) where the positive and negative value of represents the power supplied to the terminal loads and fed into the grid respectively. 2) cost of natural gas: (6) c) Constraint of battery control 1) input and output power capacities: (7) when , battery is charging; when , battery is discharging; when , battery is nonoperating. 2) constraint of SOC: (8) 3) SOC dynamics: (9) 4) initial SOC: (10) d) Constraint of CHP unit operation [10][13] 1) constraint of operation of CHP unit: (11) 2) output power of CHP unit: (12)

The scheduling problem is to determine the supply quantities of various energy sources and the operating status of different energy supply equipment and devices over the scheduling horizon such that the total cost of electricity and natural gas is minimized. It is formulated as the following optimization problem:

(1) subject to the following constraints. a) System constraints 1) power balance:

3) output cooling of CHP unit: (13) 4) consumed rate of natural gas: (14)

(2) 2) cooling balance: (3) 3) the energy supplied in a period:

e) Operation of PV panels [15], [16] 1) electric power output of PV panels: A PV module is composed of PV cells in series, and multiple modules in series-parallel connection can form the PV array. The output power of entire PV panel is below (15)

(4)

where is the series number of PV cell in a PV is the series number of PV modules, and module, is the parallel number of PV module strands.

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2) I-V equation of PV cell in PV panels

Discrete variable, at , 0 otherwise.

for battery discharging

Discrete variable, 1 for CHP unit startup at , 0 for shutdown. (16) The differential of PV cell power to PV cell voltage is zero at the maximum power point (MPP), and the and current at the MPP can be voltage determined by the nonlinear equation below Power supplied to the terminal loads at (in kW). Power fed into grid at (in kW). With the linearization and above denitions, the nonlinear objective function and constraints of the optimization problem formulated in Section II is further expressed as below. a) Objective function

(18) b) Power balance (17) where output current of PV cell at (in A); output voltage of PV cell at (in V); current generated by the incident light at (in A); reverse saturation or leakage current of the diode at (in A); equivalent series resistance of the cell (in ); equivalent parallel resistance of the cell (in ); modied ideality factor. All of the aforementioned parameters depend on solar irradiance, cell surface, temperature, and the optical air mass, we can obtain the computational formula of these parameters in [16]. Through (15)(17), we can obtain the output power generated by PV panels. III. SOLUTION METHODOLOGY A. Deterministic Problem Solved by General Mixed Integer Programming Method Assume the electrical and thermal demands or loads are determined from the given demand prole in our related work [9] and the energy-efcient schedule can then be obtained through solving the optimization problem for the energy supply system. By analyzing the structure of the model, the nonlinear objective function and constraints can be linearized by introducing the following variables. Discrete variable, 1 for power supplied to terminal loads at , 0 otherwise. Discrete variable, 1 for power fed into grid at , 0 otherwise. Discrete variable, 1 for battery charging at , 0 otherwise. g) Constraint of output power of CHP unit (24) h) Constraint of output cooling of CHP unit (25) where and are parameters of CHP unit, they are de. pended on rated power of CHP unit and i) Consumed rate of natural gas (26) where and are parameters of CHP unit, they are depended on rated power of CHP unit and . Clearly the above scheduling problem is a mixed integer programming problem and can be solved by the CPLEX solver. e) Input and output power capacities (22) f) Constraint of load rate of CHP unit (23) (21) d) Electrical energy cost c) Operating state of power grid (20) (19)

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B. Stochastic Problem Solved by Scenario Tree Method Uncertainties are associated with many aspects in the above scheduling problem. First of all, the demand prole contains signicant uncertainties since the electrical and thermal demands of building occupants such as cooling, lighting, etc., are uncertain. The supply of renewable energy sources such as the power generation of PV panels is closely related to the environment and weather condition, and is thus uncertain. Therefore, to nd a schedule with the best expected cost in practice, the uncertainty in both the demand and the supply sides should be considered during the decision making. The scenario tree method [20], [21] is applied to handle the uncertainties in this paper. A scenario is basically a specic demand curve and weather condition, which is either randomly generated according to the demand prole and environmental statistics or manually constructed according to heuristics or structure information of the problem. In order to obtain a good schedule for various supply resources on average, we need to generate a set of different representative scenarios. The CPLEX solver is applied to solve the stochastic optimization problem with the average cost of all scenarios. The schedule with the forecasted loads or demands and solar generation is also obtained and is compared with the results of solving the stochastic problem. The procedure for solving an example of the stochastic problem by the scenario tree method will be presented in the next Section. If the demands and the weather condition are known perfectly beforehand, the optimal schedule can be obtained by the deterministic model for a known scenario. Comparing the schedule for a particular scenario with the one corresponding to the forecasted demand and solar generation, the value of accurate information on demand and weather can be quantied. The cost function for the scheduling problem with the uncertainties is formulated as follows. Objective function

TABLE I TOU ELECTRIC PRICE IN BEIJING (SUMMER)

IV. NUMERICAL TESTING RESULTS The problem based on a pilot low energy ofce building at the Tsinghua University campus with area of 3000 m is tested and the results are presented in this section. The energy supply system of this building consists of distribution power grid, solar PV panels (two 3-parallel modules, 54 cells in series), one battery unit (capacity of 50 kWh), and one CHP unit (rated power of 50 kW). The electrical loads include those from the HVAC system, fan coil unit (FCU), fresh air unit (FAU), and lighting, and are related to the terminal thermal loads that can be changed by blinds and window positions. The test is performed for a typical summer day (2 August 2009), hot and humid in Beijing, and the weather data is from [17]. Assume that occupants work in the building from 7:00 to 23:00. The test is rst conducted for the deterministic formulation in several steps. First of all, the electrical and thermal demand proles are obtained by solving the terminal control problem according to the occupants comfort requirements [9]. With the forecasted demand and solar output power, the scheduling problem is then solved by the CPLEX solver. For the problem with uncertainties, the demand and solar generation scenarios are generated randomly around the forecasted demand and solar output power with the prior knowledge of their distributions. The schedules are generated by solving the problem with the expected cost in (27) of all scenarios jointly. A. Electrical and Thermal Demand Proles

(27)

where scenario index of demand prole, scenario index of solar output power, ; probability of probability of scenario of demand prole; scenario of solar output power; ;

subject to all constraints of (19)(26) and linear constraints in Section II. This formulation is necessary for evaluating a schedule by the scenario tree method.

In this case the price of natural gas is 2.05 RMB/m , and the price of electricity fed into grid is 0.457 RMB/kWh. The TOU price (RMB/kWh) of electricity supplied to terminal loads is shown in Table I. For the given comfort level (indoor temperature: [22 C, 26 C]; indoor humidity: [50%, 60%]; concentration of CO : [0, 1300 ppm]; luminance lx), the electrical and cooling demand curves are obtained by solving the terminal control problem by dynamic programming [9], and are shown in Fig. 2. Fig. 2(a) shows the electric energy consumption of lighting, FAU, and FCU and Fig. 2(b) shows the thermal demand prole for cooling. The electric energy consumption of the HVAC system depends on the cooling demand prole and real-time electric prices. The electric peak-loads are during 7:00 to 11:00, and 19:00 to 23:00. From 13:00 to 18:00, the outdoor temperature is very high and the cooling demand is high but the lighting

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Fig. 2. (a) Electrical demand prole. (b) Thermal demand prole. Fig. 3. (a) Composition of electrical energy supplies. (b) Composition of cooling energy supplies.

demand is low since solar luminance is good. To reduce the energy cost, the HVAC system performs precooling at 6:00 when the energy price is low. B. Solution by the Mixed Integer Programming Method Assume the demand prole as the forecasted values. The ILOG CPLEX is applied to solve the problem in (18)(26) and linear constraints in Section II with the error gap set as 0.0015. The composition of electrical and thermal energy supplies are shown in Fig. 3. In Fig. 3(a), the electrical energy consumption comes from the lighting, FAU, FCU, battery charging, HVAC system, and power fed to grid and is supplied by the power grid, PV panels, battery, and CHP unit. It is seen that the PV panels, battery and CHP unit supply a signicant amount of electrical energy in peak-price periods (7:0011:00, 19:0023:00) with signicant reduction in total energy cost compared with the case of the pure power grid supply. The cooling demand is mostly supplied by the HVAC system with a small supplementary amount provided by CHP unit as seen in Fig. 3(b). In Fig. 4, positive value of the battery control signal is for charging, negative value for discharging and 0 for idle (a), corresponding to positive, negative, and 0 output of the battery (b). As expected the battery is charging in lower price periods, discharging in peak-price periods, and is fully charged before peak-price periods. It discharges at very low demand periods to feed the electrical energy into the grid. Meanwhile, in order to supply the building in emergency, the SOC should be kept at a required level. The relationship between battery capacity and overall cost is tested and shown in Fig. 5(a). When a battery with larger capacity is installed, more cost savings can be obtained with higher investment. Clearly a trade-off needs to be made. The relationship between battery capacity and usage frequency is

Fig. 4. (a) Battery control strategy. (b) Output power of battery.

also investigated as shown In Fig. 5(b). It is observed that a larger battery would result in less frequent usage with possibly longer life, and subsequently higher investment.

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Fig. 6. Control strategy and output level of CHP unit.

Fig. 5. (a) Relationship between capacity and overall cost. (b) Relationship between capacity and usage frequency. TABLE II ENERGY COSTS WITH AND WITHOUT BATTERY

Fig. 7. Output of power grid.

Table II shows the total costs with and without a battery in different weather conditions. It can be seen that electric energy storage has signicant impact on building energy efciency especially when peak shaving of solar energy is not signicant. The energy generation and the control strategy of the CHP unit are shown in Fig. 6. The CHP control signal is similarly dened as the battery control signal. It is observed in the Fig. 6 that the CHP unit operates during peak-price periods since natural gas is cheaper than electric power for the same amount of cooling energy, and is shutdown at 10:00 due to availability of solar energy. It is not often used in summer based on economic considerations. The energy supply by the power grid is shown in Fig. 7. The negative value means power fed into the grid in the periods when the solar illumination is high and the solar energy collected is more than the terminal loads, and when it is economic to discharge the battery more than the need of the low terminal loads. C. Sensitivity of the Schedule In practice, both the demand and the weather dependent solar generation are uncertain. It is interesting to test the sensitivity of

a schedule under different scenarios. Assume the demand and solar energy follow independent normal distribution with the standard deviation of 5% the forecasts. Ten demand curves and ten output power curves of PV panels are generated as shown in Fig. 8 with totally 100 scenarios. The costs for all scenarios are shown in Fig. 9 and their standard deviation is 0.41% around the one with the forecasted demand and solar energy. This means that the performance of the schedule obtained with the forecasted demand prole and weather condition are relatively robust or insensitive to the uncertainties in demands and weather conditions. D. Value of Accurate Information on Demand Obtaining accurate demand and solar energy forecasts requires real-time update and is thus costly. It is of practical interest to quantify the value of such accurate information for planning and operation. If the benet due to accurate forecasts does not match the extra effort or investment, one may not bother to frequently update the forecasts and reschedule. To analyze the value of the accurate information, the schedule obtained with the forecasted demand and solar generation in Section IV-B is applied to the 100 scenarios generated in Section IV-C and compared with those obtained with the actual demands and solar generation. The cost differences are shown in Fig. 10. It is observed that the differences are insignicant in terms of the mean (0.4763 RMB) and standard deviation (0.3857 RMB), and the accurate information does not bring signicant benet or extra energy savings. A good schedule can

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Fig. 10. The value of actual demand and solar generation.

Fig. 8. (a) Electrical demand generated of all scenarios. (b) Cooling demand generated of all scenarios. (c) Solar generation of all scenarios.

Fig. 9. Costs for all scenarios based on the control strategy obtained in Section IV-B.

Fig. 11. (a) Electrical demands of all scenarios. (b) Cooling demands of all scenarios. (c) Solar generation of all scenarios.

be obtained with the forecasted demand prole and weather condition. E. Stochastic Problem Solved by the Scenario Tree Method The objective for solving the optimization problem with uncertainties or stochastic optimization should be in the form of average. In the scenario tree method, a schedule should have

good average performance over all scenarios. To capture the major uncertainty of solar generation for the problem considered in this paper, a new set of 100 scenarios are randomly generated with the forecasted demand and solar generation proles as the means, where the distributions of the uncertainties are assumed i.i.d. and Gaussian. The scenarios with 5% demand variation (standard deviation to the mean) and 20% solar generation variation are shown in Fig. 11.

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Fig. 13. The integrated optimization of demand & supply.

the deterministic method with the forecasted demands and solar generation is quite good and only underperform less than 2% in comparison with the scenario tree method, and is thus a good method for this problem. V. DISCUSSIONS The energy consumption in buildings is affected by both the supply and the demand. A framework of the integrated control and optimization is proposed as shown in Fig. 13 to solve this challenging problem iteratively. With this framework, the terminal control problem is solved for the given comfort levels required by the occupants in the building and the time-of-use prices of electricity, and the demand prole on electrical and thermal loads (cooling and heating) are obtained. The terminal control and optimization within this framework are discussed in Sun et al. [9]. Then with the demand proles and solar generation given, the supply scheduling problem is solved to allocate and schedule energy supply resources as discussed in this paper. The research work on the integrated optimization is under development. VI. CONCLUSION Optimized control and operation are extremely important for building energy efciency. Microgrid technology provides a way to connect various energy supply resources and the demands, electrical and thermal, and to facilitate efcient building operation. With electrical and thermal demand proles obtained in terminal control, a practical model is formulated as a mixed integer optimization problem. The CPLEX solver is applied to solve the problem with the forecasted demands and solar generation. The problem with uncertainties is solved by the scenario tree method. Numerical testing results demonstrate that methods proposed in the paper are efcient and effective in nding good solutions for building energy supply allocation and scheduling. The sensitivity of the control strategy and the value of the accurate demand and solar generation are also tested. It is found that by comparing the deterministic and stochastic model, scheduling with the forecasted demand and solar generation under deterministic formation performs quite well for this problem, and is thus an efcient approximation even with signicant uncertainties.

Fig. 12. (a) The optimal average cost and the cost of each scenario. (b) The control strategy of battery and CHP unit. TABLE III THE PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF DETERMINISTIC METHOD AND SCENARIO TREE METHOD

Since the scale of the problem considered in this paper is small, the CPLEX solve is applied to solve the stochastic optimization problem with the average cost of all scenarios. The computational time is less than 10 s on Windows PC with 3.2 GHz and 2 GB memory (the solution time is less than 0.2 s if there is only one scenario). The optimal average cost (521 RMB) and that for each scenarios are shown in Fig. 12(a), and the control strategies of battery and CHP unit are shown in Fig. 12(b). The performance of the scenarios tree method is compared with the deterministic method with the forecasted demand and solar generation. The results are summarized in Table III. It can be seen that the stochastic method does perform better in various scenarios. It is also observed that the schedule obtained by

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank Dr. Stella M. Oggianu and Dr. Craig Walker at United Technologies Research Center for their constructive comments, and Prof. Peter B. Luh, Mr. Biao Sun, Mr. Jianxiang Shen, and Mr. Shupeng Sun of Tsinghua University for their valuable advices, suggestions, and testing work. REFERENCES
[1] N. Lu, T. Taylor, W. Jiang, J. Correia, L. R. Leung, and P. C. Wong, The temperature sensitivity of the residential load and commercial building load, presented at the 2009 IEEE Power Energy Soc. Gen. Meet., Calgary, AB, Canada, PESGM2009-000775. [2] Z. Jiang and H. Rahimi-Eichi, Design, modeling and simulation of a green building energy system, presented at the 2009 IEEE Power Energy Soc. Gen. Meet., Calgary, AB, Canada, PESGM2009-000636. [3] J. S. Katz, Educating the smart grid, presented at the IEEE Energy2030 Conf., Atlanta, GA, Nov. 1718, 2008. [4] R. ONeill, Smart grids sound transmission investments, IEEE Power Energy Mag., vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 104102, Sep.Oct. 2007. [5] Y. J. Huang, The impact of climate change on the energy use of the US residential and commercial building sector, Lawrence Berkeley Nat. Lab.. Berkeley, CA, 2006. [6] Building management systems [Online]. Available: http://www.efcient-systems.com/controlsystems.html [7] D. Mooney and B. Kroposki, Electricity, resources, and building systems integration at the national renewable energy laboratory, presented at the 2009 IEEE Power Energy Soc. Gen. Meet., Calgary, AB, Canada, PESGM2009-001226. [8] Building materials [Online]. Available: http://asusmart.com/buildingmat.php [9] B. Sun, P. B. Luh, Q. S. Jia, Z. Jiang, F. Wang, and C. Song, An integrated control of shading blinds, natural ventilation, and HVAC systems for energy saving and human comfort, presented at the 6th Annu. IEEE Conf. Autom. Sci. Eng., Toronto, ON, Canada, Aug. 2124, 2010. [10] X. Yi, Study on the characteristics of conventional liquid desiccants, (in Chinese) M.S. thesis, Tsinghua Univ., Beijing, China, May 2009. [11] X. Wu, Parameter optimization and performance analysis on largescale combined-cycle cogeneration systems, (in Chinese) M.S. thesis, Tsinghua Univ., Beijing, China, June 2005. [12] M. Lu, Design and practical operation of a new high performance condenser, (in Chinese) M.S. thesis, Tsinghua Univ., Beijing, China, Nov. 2007. [13] Z. Lai, Simulation of quasi-steady state model for BCHP system, (in Chinese) M.S. thesis, Tsinghua Univ., Beijing, China, Jun. 2009. [14] N. Saito, T. Niimura, K. Koyanagi, and R. Yokoyama, Trade-off analysis of autonomous microgrid sizing with PV, diesel, and battery storage, presented at the 2009 IEEE Power Energy Soc. Gen. Meet., PESGM2009-000538. [15] Y. B. Wang, C. S. Wu, H. Liao, and H. H. Xu, Steady-state model and power ow analysis of grid-connected photovoltaic power system, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Ind. Technol., Chengdu, China, 2008, pp. 16. [16] M. G. Villalva, J. R. Gazoli, and E. R. Filho, Modeling and circuit-based simulation of photovoltaic arrays, in Proc. Brazilian Power Electron. Conf. COBEP09, pp. 12441254. [17] DeST Software 2008 [Online]. Available: http://www.dest com.cn, Available:, Dept. Building Sci., Tsinghua Univ.. Beijing, China

[18] Z. Lu, C. Wang, Y. Min, S. Zhou, J. Lv, and Y. Wang, Overview on microgrid research, (in Chinese) Autom. Elect. Power Syst., vol. 5, no. 19, pp. 100106, Oct. 2007. [19] C. M. Colson and M. H. Nehrir, A review of challenges to real-time power management of microgrids, presented at the 2009 IEEE Power Energy Soc. Gen. Meet., Calgary, AB, Canada, PESGM2009-001250. [20] J. Wang and M. Shahidehpiour, Security constrained unit commitment with volatile wind power generation, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 13191327, Aug. 2008. [21] J. Dupacova, N. Growe, and W. Romisch, Scenario reduction in stochastic programming: An approach using probability metrics, Math. Program. Series A, vol. 3, pp. 493511, 2003.

Xiaohong Guan (M93SM95F07) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in control engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1982 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, in 1993. He was a Senior Consulting Engineer with PG&E from 1993 to 1995. He visited the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University from January 1999 to February 2000. Since 1995 he has been with the Systems Engineering Institute, Xian Jiaotong University, Xian, China, and appointed as the Cheung Kong Professor of Systems Engineering since 1999, and as the Dean of School of Electronic and Information Engineering since 2008. Since 2001 he has also been the Director of the Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and served the Head of Department of Automation from 2003 to 2008. His research interests include complex networked systems including smart power grid, planning and scheduling of electrical power and manufacturing systems, and electric power markets.

Zhanbo Xu received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering and automation from Harbin Institute of Technology University, China, in 2008. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at the Systems Engineering Institute, Xian Jiaotong University, China. His research interests include smart power grid, buildings energy management and automation, and optimization of large-scale systems.

Qing-Shan Jia (S02M06) received the B.E. degree in automation and the Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2002 and 2006, respectively. He is currently a Lecturer at the Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CFINS), Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in 2006, and a Visiting Scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2010. His research interests include theories and applications of discrete event dynamic systems (DEDSs) and simulation-based performance evaluation and optimization of complex systems.