Special Issue: Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings—Part 1

Abstract

The GEB special issue JESBC covers a wide range of topics to enhance the sustainability, resiliency, and flexibility buildings energy systems including innovative technologies to enhance energy efficiency for various building components, building integrated renewable energy technologies, and advanced optimized control strategies in order to design and operate smart grid-interactive efficient buildings. In particular, the GEB special issue covering part of the JESBC August volume and entire November volume includes some of the latest analyses for a suite of technologies and applications for grid-connected buildings and communities. Some of technologies included in the special issue are dynamic insulation systems for building envelopes, thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs), fault detection and diagnostic (FDD) tools, building integrated fuel cells, and rooftop PV systems. These technologies and other proven energy efficiency strategies have been applied to design and operate high energy performance buildings including net-zero energy and carbon-neutral buildings and communities. The first paper included in this issue is entitled “Load Communication in Populations of Thermostatically Controlled Loads.” The authors in this paper introduce and evaluate a promising feedback-based method to modify each thermostat behavior based on the actions of neighboring TCLs to reduce unwanted oscillatory effects when applied to demand response events.In the second paper entitled “Bringing Automated Fault Detection and Diagnostic tools for HVAC&R into the Mainstream,” the authors perform an independent assessment of ten commercially available FDD tools installed to detect faults for roof top units (RTUs) in ten different sites. The sites include different building types ranging from an office, a restaurant, and a school. The paper reports on the first phase to evaluate the performance of the implemented FDD tools using an independent monitoring system based on comprehensive set of sensors used to verify the validity of the identified faults.