Virtual energy storage-based coordination of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems for secondary frequency regulation

Commercial buildings heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems can provide secondary frequency regulation (SFR) by exploiting their thermal inertia, but their complex dynamics hinder systematic participation in ancillary service markets. This paper proposes an aggregation and allocation framework for Commercial buildings HVAC systems based on virtual energy storage (VES) modeling. At the single-building level, the thermal response of a commercial building is captured by a low-order VES whose state represents an abstracted indoor thermal energy. At the aggregation level, a state-aware allocation scheme that distributes the aggregate regulation command among buildings according to their virtual energy states and power limits is proposed. Results show that the VES identified of a medium building validated model accurately reproduces indoor temperature and power deviations within the comfort band. And case studies on typical and biased activation days demonstrate that the proposed framework achieving the same aggregate tracking with a more comfort-friendly power distribution.