Project overview
The core vision of this project is the development and pilot of a low cost, robust platform for intelligent building energy usage that, combined with a new peer-to-peer energy market system, will facilitate localised energy trading and enable participation of small to medium enterprises in National Grid balancing services. The academic researchers, will work with commercial lead KiwiPower to: (i) Develop algorithms that learn the thermal performance of the commercial building in which the building management system is installed, enabling optimal control of the building's heating and air conditioning system during demand response periods (where, for example, air conditioning use will be optimally curtailed to reduce peak loads without adversely affecting the comfort of the building's occupants). (ii) Design, develop and evaluate and effective local energy market in which autonomous trading agents representing both individual buildings and also standalone generation and storage facilities can interact to optimally balance energy demand against local generation and storage capacity. The new platform and market will enable SMEs to control and monitor their production and consumption assets, to automatically manage supply and demand at a localised level, and respond to national balancing requirements and financial incentives to shift demand. This project is innovative as: (i) The novel low cost intelligent energy system, incorporating learning algorithms, overcomes existing cost barriers for SMEs, enabling them to benefit from the latest energy optimisation algorithms to reduce costs and improve efficiency. (ii) It will prove the technical and commercial viability of localised peer-to-peer energy markets and the ability for SMEs to be involved in national electricity balancing services.