Architecting the Future: Exploring Coordinated Control Frameworks for Connected Communities

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.