The services demanded of commercial building customers—heating, cooling, ventilating, lighting, computing, and plug loads—require significant energy and contribute to peak energy demand. Large commercial customers (1 MW, >50,000 sf) typically have a Building Management System that controls building services in order to respond to price signals. Residential customers have an abundance of demand response solutions, communicating thermostats, for example.
Small commercial customers (< 100 kW, <50,000 sf), however, typically do not have BMS, and thus cannot easily participate in demand response. This problem has not been addressed because an open source and open architecture enabling platform runs counter to the business model of many companies, who want to maintain a single vendor, proprietary solution.
The proposed open source and open architecture platform, a Demand Response manager based on the eXtensible Building Operating System (XBOS-DR), can interface with multiple hardware devices from different vendors as well as include software applications from various vendors. With its ability to create a virtual BMS for small commercial buildings by networking thermostats and other controllers, XBOS-DR can provide large and small commercial customers with a variety of choices for demand response capability.
The project goal is to improve energy efficiency by enabling effective management and integration of demand response associated with tariff schedules and distributed generation with other building services in residential and commercial buildings by developing a system architecture supporting demand-response message passing and translation between the smart grid and the XBOS-DR building management system.
