Consumer flexibility driven energy management for air conditioning systems in a building community

Demand response (DR) programmes are considered as elegant solutions to supply the permanent growth in energy demand. The residential building sector accounts for a significant amount of this growth. By means of their elastic behaviour in energy usage, residential consumers can manage their energy consumption for cost savings by participating in DR programmes. A substantial part of energy consumption in a residence is due to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) loads. As an HVAC load, air conditioners have high ownership rates and are energy‐intensive appliances. This study, therefore, presents a cost and comfort effective energy management scheme based on consumer flexibilities for air conditioning systems in a residential building community on DR purposes. Three different pricing mechanisms under two different scenarios are employed to analyse the benefits and effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, a strategy is performed to fairly allocate the cost savings of the community among consumers. The obtained results verified the efficacy of the proposed scheme in providing cost‐saving, peak load reduction, and desired thermal convenience.