Archetype Building Energy Models for Residential Sector: Importance of Uncontrolled Inputs in Predictive Control and Energy Flexibility

A 1^st-order gray-box archetype is developed using high-quality measurements from an unoccupied experimental house to investigate the sensitivity of economic model-based predictive control performance under Québec’s dynamic electricity tariff for the residential sector, rate Flex-D, to uncertainty in the weather forecast. The archetype incorporates the outside air temperature and the solar gain as uncontrolled heat sources and has three parameters: the overall thermal capacitance, the thermal resistance to the outside air temperature, and the solar aperture. The performance of economic model-based predictive control is compared under the uncertain day-ahead forecast and the historical measurements of the same day. The results show that the most influential uncontrolled input directing the performance of economic model-based predictive control under rate Flex-D is the price signal, which makes the impact of uncertainty in the weather forecast almost negligible.