UNS: Localized Distributed Power Generation: Economically Robust, Demand-Optimized Placement of Urban Energy Production Systems

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1512740Pardyjak, Eric More American cities are considering adopting various distributed power generation strategies to minimize transmission losses, reduce emissions and increase overall energy system resilience. While substantial knowledge exists on individual generation technologies, less is understood regarding the place-specific impacts of these technologies on the urban environment. To address this, this project will develop an integrated building simulation and optimization framework to study the interaction between distributed power generation installations and the built environment in cities. The framework will be used to understand feedback mechanism associated with changing supply and demand mixtures in real cities. Specifically, an understanding will be gained on how urban infrastructure and microclimate affect energy demands and how effectively and economically a simple local generation system can meet those demands. The focus will be on two commonly used and technologically mature prime movers, solar photovoltaic arrays and natural gas turbine-generator sets. Four U.S. cities, representing a range of climate types and average electricity prices, will be used as case studies to test the system: Atlanta, Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City. There is a critical need to understand the complex interactions and tradeoffs between demand moderating urban form options, and distributed power generation opportunities. The hypothesis of this research is that a site-specific optimal mix of distributed power generation and microscale building demand reduction strategies exists that can minimize both internal and external costs resulting in more sustainable cities. Previous work using the QUIC-EnvSim package has demonstrated the importance of considering the built environment together with its local, natural environment for calculating energy and mass fluxes in the urban environment. Similarly, meeting the energy demands of a building should depend on consideration of the building's environment and neighboring buildings. EnergyPlus is a well known tool capable of performing detailed individual building simulations, available from the DOE. In this project, the two simulation packages will be dynamically coupled in such a way that building simulations conducted in EnergyPlus will use QUIC-EnvSim environmental data, and building performance calculations from EnergyPlus will inform the QUIC simulations. The coupled system will be integrated within a decision making framework to enable hypothesis testing regarding site-specific optimal mixes of distributed power generation. These simulation tools will be developed in a Multi-criteria Decision Making environment designed to aid urban planners, engineers and architects in designing buildings and surrounding landscaping in ways that integrate best with distributed generation capacity. Through workshops, stakeholder's input will be directly integrated into the project, enabling a more fluid integration with practitioners. The understanding gained from this project will guide utility companies and public utility planners in developing plans for expanding power generation in urban areas while reducing the investment risk associated with additional central generation capacity. Further, the knowledge gained from this project will help communities and developers in placing distributed power generation within existing groups of buildings in a way that provides an economic benefit to the power consumers. Simulation data results for the cities and scenarios will be made available in an archival form to researchers, and the modified EnergyPlus-QUIC-EnvSim model will be released upon request, along with the custom power generation packages and instructions for developing and incorporating other types of DG. This project will provide interdisciplinary training in engineering, computer science, economics, urban planning, and energy policy for graduate students directly via involvement in the project, as well as more broadly to engineering students through a new Energy Systems course that will be developed. A summer outreach program will also be developed to target underrepresented groups.