Liverpool University and Faculty of Engineering at Al-Qadisiyah University, Iraq

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Abstract: Commercial Buildings are no longer just national heat and power network energy loads, but they are becoming part of a smarter grid by including their own dedicated heat and power generation. A building integrated approach of Combined Heat and Power (CHP) generation and photovoltaic power generation (PV) known as Combined Heat and power with PV (CHPV) is emerging as a complementary energy supply solution to conventional boilers in the design of sustainable commercial buildings and local energy systems. The merits for the building user/owner of this approach are; to reduce life time energy running costs; reduce carbon emissions to contribute to UK’s 2020/2030 climate change targets and provide a more resilient energy supply solution. Soft target markets for CHPV are building clusters such as; public buildings such as hospitals, colleges, universities and buildings and private sector complexes such as retail parks and science parks. The control methodology of CHPV systems is the main research challenge to provide reliable system performance to enhance the successful deployment of these systems. The CHPV solution provides all heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) facilities as well as electrical power supply. This power is generated by a locally connected CHP system electrically connected to a private wire network (PWN) which simultaneously allows the utilisation of building side installed PV power generation to be shared with all buildings in the cluster/complex. This paper presents a novel CHPV system design topology for robust, reliable and high performance control of building temperatures and energy supply from the local energy system. This system’s topology includes; a hot water network; a central hot water storage system to supply heat to the building; electrically powered ventilation and cooling in the building; a centralised CHP engine and control; centralised gas boiler supply; a thermal hot water store for the heat network and its control; PV array installed on the building and back-up/supplementary power provided by the national grid. The advanced control system solution presented in this paper, aims to achieve desired building temperatures using thermostatic control whilst simultaneously tracking a specified national grid power demand profile. The results from simulations presented in the paper show the efficacy of the novel control strategy of CHPV and complementary gas boilers to control energy utilisation of the building’s heat and power whilst tracking a required national grid power demand.

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