Quantifying Demand Flexibility in the Irish Commercial Building Stock

Ireland's commercial and public-sector building stock is a large, controllable and largely unquantified source of electricity demand. The Irish Building Stock Observatory (IBSO) is currently carrying out work to characterise the non-residential stock and to develop a set of non-domestic Reference Dwellings, in parallel with the residential Reference Dwelling set (Li et al., 2025) that underpins the companion PhD in this programme. This thesis does not repeat that characterisation. Instead, it works from a portfolio dataset of real buildings. The student will assemble a representative dataset of buildings drawn from OPN Buildings' live portfolio, which spans universities, airports, manufacturing sites, hospitals, museums and local-authority buildings, checked for representativeness against the sector typologies IBSO's work identifies. For each building in the dataset, the thesis will examine measured electrical loads from OPN's continuous sub-metered and building-management-system data, and aggregate these into demand load profiles, first for individual buildings and then for the portfolio as a whole. These demand profiles will be compared against supply-side profiles, principally the time-varying renewable share and curtailment pattern of the Irish electricity system, to identify where and when demand and supply diverge. The thesis will then qualify the potential of the dataset's building loads to adapt: to switch on at times of excess renewable supply and switch off at times of scarcity, moving demand toward an idealised energy system in which supply and demand are harmonised. Because this adaptation depends on both building-level control capability and system-level communication, the thesis addresses two further questions. First, how much of the identified adaptive potential is deliverable given each building's Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI) score and Building Automation and Control System (BACS) class. Second, how a platform such as OPN's could function as a communication layer, or middleware, between the TSO and the demand side: aggregating building-level load and flexibility data upward for system visibility, and translating TSO dispatch or price signals downward into instructions individual buildings' control systems can act on.

This PhD suits a candidate with a background in building services or energy engineering, energy systems, with an interest in working directly with real operational data from a live national portfolio.

 Funding Agency: Research Ireland

Student Stipend per annum

€ 25,000

 Materials & Travel Budget per annum

€ 3,250

 Fees covered by the funding per annum

€5,750

Duration of Funding

48 months

If you are interested in submitting an application for this project, please complete an Expression of Interest.

 https://forms.office.com/e/0hCcrv2Gkp