This paper describes a technique for increasing energy efficiencies in the demand profile of smart buildings and a smart grid, thus reducing the overall cost and resulting in savings resources. The authors claim a ten percent reduction in generation costs and a 20 percent building cost energy savings over a passive demand system. These savings would be achieved if the technique were widely deployed.

After an introduction and a section on related work, section 3 describes a proposed framework. A figure displays the three framework components: building, distribution, and transmission. Building energy scheduling reduces cost and enables demand-scheduling aggregation among participants. As the authors point out: “The number of building customers in a regional electricity market could add up to millions.” There are no clear estimates of the costs of retrofitting these millions of customer buildings, nor an estimate of the time necessary to complete the retrofitting.

The authors developed a set of algorithms at the building level and at the power system level. They conducted an experiment to verify their approach.

Section 4 discusses the proposed framework. Section 4.1 covers the building element. Three pages of inscrutable mathematics follow. The average engineer cannot challenge the math and must take the results on faith. Section 4.2 covers the algorithms for the supply side with ever more mathematics.

Section 5 compares their solution to a baseline passive demand response. In section 6, the experimental results are covered, along with a discussion of how to deal with so-called “malicious” customers who seek to lower their own operating costs.

Taken together, this paper requires foreknowledge of the field. Indeed, there are 48 referred articles in the references. The reduced cost of energy achieved by this approach must be balanced by the time to create the full complement of buildings and attendant distribution and transmission system modifications. In such a time frame, advances in energy creation and storage; heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) improvements; and construction advances might mitigate against deployment of such a scheme.