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The retail store as a smart grid ready building: Current practice and future potentials

Retail stores use a considerable amount of energy. Therefore, this type of building is important to consider for providing demand-side flexibility services. However, existing work on demand-side flexibility has only considered narrow aspects of the loads and opportunities in retail buildings. This paper details a study on the loads and practices in different types of retail stores, as well as the flexibility potential. Four different retail store types were inspected, cataloged, and analyzed together with their energy usage. The results highlight that large percentages of the store loads are too diverse to group into usable categories. The usual categories are present, like Lighting, Frost, Cooling, Comfort Cooling, Ventilation, and one less common group: Ovens. In the supermarket screened, the ovens took up 60% of the flexibility potential and about 19% of the Hypermarket's potential. Flexibility potential numbers are detailed, as well as the current ability to control the loads. Retail stores are different from other sectors in regards to their motivations for upgrading installations. Some of the notable requirements, potential challenges, and barriers to realizing the flexibility potential are highlighted in relation to these motivations. In conclusion, the current state of the controllable devices and the granularity with which they can be controlled are found to be lacking severely, if they are to be integrated into a modern demand response system. As retail stores are regularly renovated, an opportunity exists to introduce required technologies across stores at a faster pace than in other building types, if a business case exists.