Data-Driven Flexibility-oriented Energy Management Strategy for Building Cluster Meso Energy Hubs

Buildings owned by a single person or set of occupants can be identified as a cluster, while they may not be located in the same area. Market-related interconnection of buildings enables a company or operator to benefit from the energy flexibility of the buildings by managing them as a whole cluster. This paper proposes a clustering method that divides multiple buildings into different clusters based on building cluster Pearson correlations coefficient (PCC). Further, this research introduces a building cluster as a meso energy hub (MEEH) as an integrated and synergistic managerial framework in multi-carrier energy systems. The proposed data-driven clustering method aims to increase the PCC between the energy generations and demands of buildings divided in the same cluster MEEH. Besides PCC, on-site energy ratio (OER), on-site mismatch ratio (OMR), maximum hourly surplus (MHS), and maximum hourly deficit (MHD) are employed as energy flexible building cluster indicators to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach towards net zero energy communities (NZECs) The numerical results show that the proposed method yields 33% decrement in operation cost, 70% increment in the average value of PCC, and significant improvements in OER, OMR, MHS, and MHD as energy flexible building cluster indicators.