Abstract
The growing demand for electricity and fuel shortage is a global challenge due to rapid growth in electricity demand, especially from air conditioning in residential and commercial buildings and huge difference in peak loads between summer and winter. This means, over time, the electricity authorities will have to raise the price for electricity during the summer when it costs more to generate electricity. One way to provide a sustained short to medium term (3 to 5 years) solution, is a combination of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and peak load reduction opportunities. But to make it practical and successful, appropriate algorithms and sensing/control hardware are needed to be developed. In today's grid, with the penetration of renewable energy sources, distributed energy resources and the expected introduction of plug-in electric vehicles (PEV), demand response applications can play a crucial role in balancing the load and generation. Targeting this issue, this paper proposes to develop an innovative platform, which consists of novel optimization-control algorithms and intelligent sensors and controller designs, to enable diverse demand response and energy conservation applications ranging from individual households to the electric power grid. Our proposed platform could offer to build a smart campus where they can propose to their campus buildings flexible choices of how much power to use and when to use it, all in real-time.