Probabilistic Energy Management for Building Climate Comfort in Smart Thermal Grids with Seasonal Storage Systems

Abstract: This paper presents an energy management framework for building climate comfort (BCC) systems interconnected in a grid via aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) systems in the presence of two types of uncertainty (private and common). ATES can be used either as a heat source (hot well) or sink (cold well) depending on the season. We consider the uncertain thermal energy demand of individual buildings as a private uncertainty source and the uncertain common resource pool (ATES) between neighbors as a common uncertainty source. We develop a large-scale stochastic hybrid dynamical model to predict the thermal energy imbalance in a network of interconnected BCC systems together with mutual interactions between their local ATES. We formulate a finite-horizon mixed-integer quadratic optimization problem with multiple chance constraints at each sampling time, which is in general a non-convex problem and difficult to solve. We then provide a computationally tractable framework by extending the so-called robust randomized approach and offering a less conservative solution for a problem with multiple chance constraints. A simulation study is provided to compare completely decoupled, centralized and move-blocking centralized solutions. We also present a numerical study using a geohydrological simulation environment (MODFLOW) to illustrate the advantages of our proposed framework.