Power Flex Houses

The overall purpose of the PowerFlexHouse facility is to provide a test platform for exploring the technical potential for actively controlled buildings as an asset in intelligent power grids.

The PowerFlexHouse facility at DTU Risø is a collection of three individual houses, which have been equipped with sensors and controllable power and heating equipment in order to enable live experiments on active load management. In terms of power, heating, ventilation and hot water supply the houses appear as islands to the rest of DTU Risø Campus buildings, and do thereby offer numerous research opportunities.

Building automation
The 3 houses in the facility are different types of buildings adapted to various isolation standards and do comprise different appliances and devices. This variety provides an opportunity to research in building controllability and offers a representative set of buildings to test home automation controllers within different environments.

Grid interaction
The houses can be operated as single entities or as combined loads to the grid. With a peak load of 10 to 20kW, the buildings are well-sized for parallel operation on the SYSLAB power grid. All loads can be controlled by the central building gateway which receives data and events from bus controlled wired or wireless switches and sensors. Through its´ own grid control node, the building controller can get information on the status of the power grid, internal status and weather conditions, and adapt its control strategy accordingly. Active policies, measurement data and user settings can be communicated back to the grid.

Main Specification for the PowerFlexHouse facility:
The following load units are automatically controllable as flexible loads and can be monitored: 

The PowerFlexHouse facility is a platform for a number of research activities:

Consumer impact studies
The impact of the required service level on the load flexibility and the potential economic benefit for the consumers can be analyzed. The various controllable electrical units are controlled within given conditions according to the required service level on the one hand and the potential benefits on the other hand.

Control strategies and portfolio coordination
The impact on the total efficiency (in terms of cost per kWh) of various control strategies for the demand can be tested – including central management, distributed management based on simulated local price signals, the voltage levels the common line frequency. Control dependency on measurement and requirement to connection/interfaces can be analyzed.

Grid impact and system efficiency
The impact on the overall system efficiency of the time step and time delay (from hours to seconds) of the synthetic price signal provided to the consumer can be analyzed – including a) fixed prices within an hour, b) new (fixed) price signals every minute and c) asynchronous local price signals defined by actual local status.

User simulation Since the buildings are not occupied, the PowerFlexHouse facility provides several devices that can simulate user behavior. Presence sensors can be automatically triggered and windows and doors can be opened.