Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Connected communities are groups of grid-interactive efficient buildings able to work together to address grid challenges and building needs at a community level. They provide greater benefits than building-by-building approaches, optimizing multiple buildings to reduce distribution infrastructure capacity requirements, improve grid utilization of diverse energy technologies, and create new value streams from buildings. Connected communities have been identified as an important part of decarbonizing the grid, particularly in their role to use demand flexibility to support greater degrees of variable renewable energy in the power supply. The DOE Connected Communities program selected 10 projects throughout the U.S. to demonstrate cutting edge connected communities approaches. These projects utilize diverse energy technologies and include both residential and commercial buildings, retrofit and new construction, numbering in the tens to thousands per community. These projects are led by diverse stakeholders driven by different use cases, including utilities, homebuilders, energy service providers, universities, research organizations, and more. To enable community-scale benefits, these projects must have control mechanisms for coordinating the operation of buildings and distributed energy resources such as generation and storage. Several types of coordinated control architectures have evolved in the Connected Communities program, influenced by the stakeholder use case, existing market conditions, and the types of building and energy resources integrated. This paper describes these architectures, as well as their use cases, benefits, and challenges they face during their implementation. The findings can support scalability of community-scale coordinated energy systems by clarifying tradeoffs in their design for utilities, control vendors, and developers.