Position Paper: Towards a Quantification of the Demand-side Flexibility of Buildings

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SmartEn brought out this paper with the aim to set out its position on the need to quantify the Demand Side Flexibility of a building as a component of the local energy system’s carbon footprint.

In this paper, smartEn outlines the benefits of a building energy performance quantification metric that incorporates DSF and recommends an ideal format of expressing the Actual Performance Metric.

SmartEn believes that the quantification of a building’s energy performance is an important enabling step on the road to climate neutrality, and in supporting the Renovation Wave initiative.

The smartEn proposal is innovative for three reasons:

– quantifying first the CO2 contribution rather than providing a measure of KWh allows a combination of the benefits of energy efficiency and flexibility and measure in a simple manner the carbon neutrality trajectory for buildings,

– doing this with live data provides actual rather than theoretical performance. This not only makes use of existing systems such as smart meters, sub-meters, building energy management systems and digital platforms, it also provides a record of actual performance at any point in time,

– it enables an output measure that is not dependent on specific approved technologies. This will accelerate innovation at the same time as simplifying the developmentand management of the measure.

With this in mind, it is expected that a metric could be developed in time to inform the Renovation Wave, that will identify where priorities should be applied from current building energy performance and demonstrate what has been achieved post renovation.

Whilst there is an emphasis in the paper on flexibility -this is because it is an area that is currently under-represented despite its growing importance –it is a gap in the many current building performance measures.

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