From Smart to Sustainable to Grid-Friendly: A Generic Planning Framework for Enabling the Transition Between Smart Home Archetypes

The concept of nearly zero energy (nZE) or sustainable buildings is prominently featured in the EU's energy strategy. However, transitioning to the envisioned era of “smartness” and “sustainability” involves overcoming several technoeconomic barriers: the difference in nature between different building archetypes, the simultaneous management of daily and yearly objectives by the energy management system (EMS), the impact on distribution grids and the required modelling detail. Focusing on addressing such concerns in the scope of the residential sector, this work proposes a generic mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) framework for modelling smart appliances (conventional and new advanced approaches) as well as for the seamless transition of residential homes from passive to smart, to sustainable and finally to grid-friendly entities. The framework includes an adaptive rolling horizon strategy accounting for the yearly nZE objective and a cost-grid impact trade-off strategy for handling flexibility requests. The energy management framework and all developed models are validated in several different scenarios, including a comprehensive sensitivity analysis.