A decoupled demand response control strategy of building cooling systems for providing fast and precise flexibility services

Increased renewable energy integration for carbon neutrality necessitates grid-interactive buildings, and the central cooling systems in commercial buildings could offer significant energy flexibility through rapid power curtailment to enhance the grid reliability. At present, achieving fast and precise flexibility services utilizing building cooling systems remains a critical challenge, concerning the response speed and provision accuracy. This paper, therefore, proposes a decoupled demand response control strategy that decouples the two critical tasks of fast demand reduction and precise demand regulation. This strategy incorporates a sequence reset optimization scheme that re-determines the number of operating chillers, thereby enabling an immediate and approximate resetting of the system power use. At the same time, a measurement-based feedback demand regulation scheme is engaged to further adjust and maintain the power use precisely at the pre-set target while ensuring proper cooling distribution. To facilitate practical implementation, it is designed to be deployable on existing building automation systems. Simulation-based experimental tests indicate that the proposed strategy can effectively accomplish various demand limiting tasks across different reduction levels while ensuring proper cooling distribution.