An advanced predictive battery control strategy for plus energy building flexibility: Simulation-based assessment and laboratory experimental setup

Buildings account for 40% of energy use making them central to achieving climate neutrality goals. In this context, energy building flexibility emerges as a key enabler, particularly when combined with the Plus Energy Building (PEB) concept, where buildings generate more renewable energy than they consume annually for achieving climate-neutrality goals. As an energy system, the building can offer demand-side flexibility by responding to external penalty signals such as price, CO 2 emissions or grid congestion, thus enabling system operators to dynamically influence consumption patterns. In this work, we present a predictive advanced PV-battery management strategy in year-long simulations across different scenarios, obtained by combining a reference building archetype, various representative European geo-clusters, and electrical consumption resulting from tailored controls of the thermal assets. The heterogeneous results across geo-clusters underscore the influence of climate, culture, and system sizing on predictive control performance, with findings from the Mediterranean cluster (with expected best case flexibility improvement in the range of 14%). These outcomes motivate the implementation of a laboratory-scale setup to port the proposed control strategies to commercially available devices under real working conditions. We report observations of a year-long monitoring of such a laboratory setup, recording the ability to shift battery stored energy toward high-priced periods, with non-standard induced inverter operations observed in 10% of the time, highlighting the system’s responsiveness under real-world conditions.