For her Master’s thesis, Fengtian Zhu focused on developing a strategy to use groups of commercial buildings to provide secondary control power, which is used to balance short-term discrepancies between power supply and demand.
Since they are large power consumers, there is a strong motivation to integrate commercial buildings into strategies to stabilize entire portions of the power grid. Her work shows how this can be achieved by exploiting the buildings’ thermal storage capacity and optimizing the power consumption of their heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.