  In this paper, the building thermal dynamic characteristics are introduced in
the community microgrid (MG) planning model. The proposed planning model is
formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) which seeks to
determine the optimal deployment strategy for various distributed energy
resources (DER). The objective is to minimize the annualized cost of community
MG, including investment cost in DER, operation cost for dispatchable
fuel-generators (DFG), energy storage system (ESS) degradation cost, energy
purchasing and peak demand charge at PCC, customer discomfort cost due to the
room temperature deviation and load curtailment cost. Given the slow thermal
dynamic characteristics of buildings, the heating, ventilation and
air-conditioning (HVAC) system in the proposed model is treated as a demand
side management (DSM) component, whose dispatch commands are provided by the
central MG controller. Numerical results based on a community MG comprising of
20 residential buildings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed planning
model and the benefits of introducing the building thermal dynamic model.
