Day‐ahead optimal scheduling of building energy microgrids based on time‐varying virtual energy storage

Abstract The thermal inertia of a building envelope endows a building with a heat storage capability, introducing scheduling flexibility to a building energy microgrid (BEM). The flexibility is usually modelled as virtual energy storage (VES) and used to optimize the operation of BEMs to reduce electricity costs. However, the VES capacity is impacted by and varies with variations in indoor/outdoor temperature. If only the building envelope's effect on heat transfer is considered, without proper quantification of scheduling flexibility provided by the building envelope, the scheduling scheme (especially VES charging/discharging schemes) will deviate from the actual VES operating conditions, which may affect the thermal comfort of individuals in buildings or bring high electricity costs. In this paper, a time‐varying building VES model (TVES) with three time‐varying parameters (virtual electric capacity (VEC), state of charge (SOC), and charge and discharge power) is proposed to quantify the electricity storage capability of the VES at different time periods for participating in operation of the BEM. Based on the TVES, a day‐ahead optimal scheduling strategy is developed for the BEM to simultaneously reduce the electricity cost and guarantee the user's thermal comfort, where the proposed time‐varying parameters of TVES are taken as constraints in the optimization. Numerical studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed TVES and optimal scheduling strategy.