Enabling Net Zero Energy Buildings With Shared Storage: A Cyber–Physical Perspective

Buildings account for a huge proportion of electricity consumption on the demand side, which is potential for renewable energy utilization. To achieve energy-efficient and green buildings, net zero energy consumption has been verified as the advanced application pattern by fully utilizing distributed energy renewable (DER) sources. In this work, we propose to enable wider-scale net zero energy buildings from a cyber–physical perspective. Specifically, shared storage is invested for energy sharing among building communities through cyber-layer communication. Besides, each building community is operated within a direct current (DC) grid at the physical layer, and each building can transfer power through the network lines. The combination of the intersharing process within each building community and the intrasharing mechanism among communities with central storage jointly improves the efficiency of energy utilization of buildings. Furthermore, the cyber–physical framework is presented as a bi-level optimization problem, which is solved by transferring it as a single-level problem without loss of optimality. Case simulations validate the cost-reduction priority of the proposed framework compared with other existing building operation patterns.