Integration of Reconfigurable Battery Systems in the Built Environment

As battery technology advances and battery system capacity expands, its penetration in buildings enables building consumers to be energy prosumers, interact with the grid to provide services, and facilitate grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEB). As such, these Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are expected to operate for a prolonged time without significant degradation, be efficient and reliable, meet the changing needs of the building and grid’s requirements, enhance grid resilience, and be fault tolerant. These novel features can be met with the application of Reconfigurable Battery Systems (RBS) technology. However, research and development of RBS integration with the built environment is limited and is the focus of this ongoing research project. This research focuses on developing versatile scalable multi-port switching topology, proposing novel sensors to improve the life span of each battery cell in the RBS system, and applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to operate the building and its RBS as a dispatchable resource. A literature review, background information, preliminary results, and future work are presented.