White papers

The SmartBuilt4EU project has set up four task forces investigating issues related to smart buildings: their objective is to identify the remaining challenges and barriers to smart building deployment, and the associated research and innovation gaps that should be addressed in the near future. Task force 3 investigates how smart buildings can interact at best with their external environment. The first topic addressed by this task force and presented in this paper is the smart buildings as provider of flexibility to the electricity grids. Within the European Commission’s strategy to reach a climate neutral Europe in 2050, the integration of more renewable electricity into the power grids constitute a key pillar. But a higher penetration of renewables into the electric grids constitutes a challenge, due to the intermittent and hardly predictable nature of some renewable energy sources – such as wind and solar – and the technical constraints of the existing electricity networks. Consequently, capturing the flexibilities offered within the energy system (flexibilities in generation, demand and storage) constitutes a significant lever to enable the integration of more RES at lower operational cost. While demand side mechanisms are already operational to exploit flexibilities in the industrial sector, buildings from the commercial and residential sectors are still far from being used at their full flexibility potential. Today, smart technologies enter more and more into those buildings, providing new means to capture the power system flexibility potential offered by equipment and end-user behaviour, with added value both for the building users and the grid. However, this flexibility potential is spread among myriads of buildings, each being source of a small amount of flexibility. Convergence is therefore required to exploit the full flexibility potential of this segment. Therefore, this white paper addressed the following questions: To what extent can buildings contribute to serving the flexibility needs of the grid? How should such services be valued so that building end-users show interest and have benefits in using them? How to facilitate the further implementation of building’s flexibilities on a technical, organisational, and contractual standpoint? In its first part, this paper provides a state of the art regarding the following issues, specific attention being paid to EC-funded projects: Definitions and requirement regarding the provision of power flexibility by smart buildings The status of deployment of smart metering and demand response in Europe Data standards and interoperability aspects, with a focus on the Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM), the needs for alignment among the communication standards from the Utility, Telecom and Home appliances industries in order to reach semantic1 interoperability, and the recent developments by the BRIDE working group regarding a reference architecture for European energy data exchange and a methodology to study the interoperability of flexibility assets The Harmonized Electricity Market Role Model to facilitate the dialogue between the electricity market participants and recommendations for its further development, as well as the USEF framework for market design to support distributed flexibilities, implementing the European Commission’s electricity market directive. The Workflows and processes enabling grid flexibility services, including the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI), and labels such as Ready2Service 4GRIDS or GOFLEX. A brainstorming process enabled to identify some key barriers and drivers regarding the deployment of power flexibility services by buildings.