Building automation for increased energy efficiency in buildings

The implementation of components and systems of building automation, in particular for HVAC systems and renewables, opens the possibility to increase the energy efficiency of (clusters of) buildings even further than originally intended. By additionally implementing different control strategies, it is possible to use the thermal storage capacity of buildings to improve their electrical characteristic in order to better meet the needs of the electricity grid. However, it is usually hard to obtain the thermal storage parameters of a building, because they need to be computed in complex thermal simulations. In this paper we present a way to quickly estimate an approximation thereof and feed it to strategies of different complexity, dependent on the free resources of the building automation installation.