Presentation by visiting professor Gregor Henze

Visiting professor Gregor Henze holds the lecture "Grid-Interactive Efficient Building R&D at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute"

Contents

The seminar will begin with a brief introduction on the concept of grid-interactive efficient buildings, a term that the US Department of Energy has recently adopted for what was previously referred to as energy or demand flexibility. To begin, the potential for commercial buildings to participate in multiple grid markets, here energy and ancillary service markets, is introduced.

A second part will focus on residential building portfolios and their ability to provide significant grid benefits with the illustration of the valuation of demand flexibility based on an integrated end-to-end analysis from generation to residential load. Novel approaches to achieve grid-interactive efficient buildings through the use of reinforcement learning applied to high-fidelity building models are going to be highlighted. The seminar concludes with a discussion of novel district energy systems along with their potential for providing demand flexibility.

Biography

Gregor P. Henze, Ph.D., P.E. is endowed full professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado. His teaching focuses on the building energy systems side of architectural engineering, i.e., thermal environmental engineering, HVAC and refrigeration systems, design of energy efficient buildings, building control and automation systems, data science for building engineering applications, and sustainable building design. His research emphasizes model-based predictive optimal control and model-free reinforcement learning control of building energy systems, building thermal mass refrigeration systems, model-based benchmarking of building operational performance, whole-building fault detection and diagnosis, control strategies for mixed-mode buildings that incorporate both natural and mechanical ventilation, uncertainty quantification of occupant behavior and its impact, human presence detection, energy analytics and decision analysis as well as the integration of building energy system operations with the electric grid system. He is the primary author of more than 150 research articles, four of which have received best paper awards, and received two patents with another pending.

He received the 2011 Colorado Cleantech Industry Association's Research and Commercialization Award. Prof. Henze is a professional mechanical engineer, certified high-performance building design professional (HBDP), member of ASHRAE, editorial board member for Journal Building Performance Simulation, Interim Co-Director of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, joint professor at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, collaborating with the power systems engineering and building research groups, as well as co-founder and chief scientist of QCoefficient, Inc., a startup developing real-time optimal control solutions for grid-interactive efficient buildings.

Here the link to the registration of the complete lecture