Solar Forecasting Requirements for Buildings MPC

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a key issue to deal with Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs) and Communities. The application of an MPC scheme in buildings requires an accurate building model and a weather forecast. How accurate needs to be a weather forecast is a common question for MPC applications. In this work a comfort tracking problem is solved through a receding horizon MPC Scheme. To take into account both solar gains and thermal inertia a second order state space model is assumed for a generic building. The Scheme is applied for Almería's climate (South Spain)to a generic building for two different seasons of the year. The impact of forecast accuracy on comfort tracking performance is assessed through a pseudorandom heteroskedastic function. The result is generalized for a community of buildings. It is shown that solar radiation forecast uncertainty has the bigger impact on the MPC performance and a methodology to make a quantitative evaluation of the forecast requirements is provided.