Distributed demand-side contingency-service provisioning while minimizing consumer disutility through local frequency measurements and inter-load communication

We consider the problem of smart and flexible loads providing contingency reserves to the electric grid and provide a Distributed Gradient Projection (DGP) algorithm to minimize loads' disutility while providing contingency services. Each load uses locally obtained grid-frequency measurements and inter-load communication to coordinate their actions, and the privacy of each load is preserved: only gradient information is exchanged---not disutility or consumption information. We provide a proof of convergence of the proposed DGP algorithm, and we compare its performance through simulations to that of a "dual algorithm" previously proposed in the literature that solved the dual optimization problem. The DGP algorithm solves the primal problem. Its main advantage over the dual algorithm is that it is applicable to convex---but not necessarily strictly convex---consumer disutility functions, such as a model of consumer behavior that is insensitive to small changes in consumption, while the dual algorithm is not. Simulations show the DGP algorithm aids in arresting grid-frequency deviations in response to contingency events and performs better or similarly to the dual algorithm in cases where the two can be compared

Predictive resource allocation for flexible loads with local QoS

Loads that can vary their power consumption without violating their Quality of service (QoS), that is flexible loads, are an invaluable resource for grid operators. Utilizing flexible loads as a resource requires the grid operator to incorporate them into a resource allocation problem. Since flexible loads are often consumers, for concerns of privacy it is desirable for this problem to have a distributed implementation. Technically, this distributed implementation manifests itself as a time varying convex optimization problem constrained by the QoS of each load. In the literature, a time invariant form of this problem without all of the necessary QoS metrics for the flexible loads is often considered. Moving to a more realistic setup introduces additional technical challenges, due to the problems' time-varying nature. In this work, we develop an algorithm to account for the challenges introduced when considering a time varying setup with appropriate QoS metrics.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure