Productiveness and Real Time Prices in energy management for HVAC systems

As people usually perform their daily activities inside buildings, it is very important to achieve a trade-off between users´ comfort and energy costs derived from it. This paper presents two novel concepts within the framework of energy-consumption management: productiveness and utility. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to provide an optimal forecast of the power consumption for an office room, as a function of Real-Time Prices (RTP) and Day-Ahead Pricing (DAP). The use of real time energy prices allows a more efficient management of thermal loads networks. In this work, a comfort control system for an office building is developed based on a new interpretation of the concepts of productiveness and utility, and a prediction of energy prices for the following day. In order to test the performance of the proposed control approach, simulation results obtained in a characteristic room of the CDdI-CIESOL-ARFRISOL building are included and discussed in detail. The preliminary results show an energy consumption saving approximately around 12%.