Abstract
In sustainable development of city structures, increasing power consumption requires maintaining power grid safety and reliability with less mismatching between electricity generation and demand. Power grid fluctuations in both power demand and generation induce an effort to supplementary setting on conventional production units and efforts to maintain grid stability. Hence, nowadays with the trend towards more complex, flexible and dynamic systems as well the higher penetration of distributed and decentralized renewable energy systems, the issue of peak reduction of demand/generation mismatch has gained importance. Shopping malls, often centrally located in urban districts, have high energy savings and carbon emissions reduction potential due to their large lighting loads, high population density and hence, a large air conditioning demand. At the same time, shopping malls cover important surface areas and are reference points in urban districts for citizens, with possibilities to provide services to both the grids and the community.
Considering typical shopping malls high impact on modern society [1], the project addresses their transformation as lighthouses of energy efficient architectures and systems as well as assessment transparency. It has the objective to re-conceptualize shopping malls through deep retrofitting, develop a systemic approach made of technologies and solution sets as well as methods and tools to support their implementation and to assess their impact in a life cycle approach. The concept is based on a systemic performance-driven approach including: integrated design process guidelines, integrative modelling environment, energy-economic evaluation tools, lean construction and management procedures, continuous commissioning approach, environmental and socio-cultural impact assessment.
The Systemic Retrofitting Approach (SRA) allows to achieve the foreseen targets: up to factor 4 reduction of energy demand, power peaks shaving and 50% increased share of renewable energy source favoured by the intelligent energy management and effective storage. This paper studies for 3 different locations in Europe the interaction between shopping centres and the electrical grids to which they are connected with the objective to identify key aspects which allow improving the current interaction and identifying the capacities that these types of buildings could give as suppliers/providers of services to the local energy grid. The results will help to optimize renewable energy production integrated in shopping centres by being able to optimize self-consumption, reducing the energy need to generate and deliver additional electricity and allow the participation of the end-users in the management of energy with grid providers.