Consumer flexibility driven energy management for air conditioning systems in a building community

Demand response (DR) programmes are considered as elegant solutions to supply the permanent growth in energy demand. The residential building sector accounts for a significant amount of this growth. By means of their elastic behaviour in energy usage, residential consumers can manage their energy consumption for cost savings by participating in DR programmes. A substantial part of energy consumption in a residence is due to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) loads. As an HVAC load, air conditioners have high ownership rates and are energy-intensive appliances. This study, therefore, presents a cost and comfort effective energy management scheme based on consumer flexibilities for air conditioning systems in a residential building community on DR purposes. Three different pricing mechanisms under two different scenarios are employed to analyse the benefits and effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, a strategy is performed to fairly allocate the cost savings of the community among consumers. The obtained results verified the efficacy of the proposed scheme in providing cost-saving, peak load reduction, and desired thermal convenience.