Assessment of electricity consumption reduction potential for city-scale buildings under different demand response strategies

Understanding the demand flexibility of city-scale buildings under different demand response (DR) strategies is crucial to balance the power supply and demand in the grid. This paper presented a case study to evaluate the electricity consumption reduction potential for buildings in Changsha under different DR strategies. First, sixtysix prototype energy models for twenty-two building types of three vintages were selected to represent 59,332 buildings in Changsha. The total electricity consumption of the building stock was obtained by aggregating the prototype electricity use intensity with their representative building area. Three DR strategies were formulated, including temperature reset, lighting control, and plug load control. Second, a toolkit, AutoBPS-DR, was developed to automatically integrate individual DR strategy as well as their combination into the baseline energy models. Five scenarios were analyzed, including the baseline case, three cases with a single DR strategy, and a case with three DR strategies combined. The results showed that compared to the baseline scenario, the electricity consumption reductions of the case buildings for a 3-h DR event under temperature reset, lighting control, plug load control, and combined control scenarios were 603.97 MWh (7.94%), 441.08 MWh (5.80%), 663.26 MWh (8.72%) and 1673.32 MWh (22.00%), respectively. In the plug load control scenarios, high-rise apartments made the largest contribution with a reduction of 134.15 MWh. Medium office buildings had the most reduction under the other three scenarios, with a reduction of 122.16 MWh for temperature reset, 107.90 MWh for lighting control, and 357.16 MWh for combination control. This study demonstrated a significant DR potential for buildings in Changsha to overcome the electricity shortage period.