A review of microgrid development in the United States – A decade of progress on policies, demonstrations, controls, and software tools

Microgrids have become increasingly popular in the United States. Supported by favorable federal and local policies, microgrid projects can provide greater energy stability and resilience within a project site or community. This paper reviews major federal, state, and utility-level policies driving microgrid development in the United States. Representative U.S. demonstration projects are selected and their technical characteristics and non-technical features are introduced. The paper discusses trends in the technology development of microgrid systems as well as microgrid control methods and interactions within the electricity market. Software tools for microgrid design, planning, and performance analysis are illustrated with each tool's core capability. Finally, the paper summarizes the successes and lessons learned during the recent expansion of the U.S. microgrid industry that may serve as a reference for other countries developing their own microgrid industries

Energy Optimization and Coordination Frameworks for Smart Homes Considering Incentives From Discomfort and Market Analysis

The electricity demand is increasing with the growing use of electricity-based appliances in today’s world. The residential sector’s electricity consumption share is also increasing. Demand response (DR) is a typical way to schedule consumers’ energy consumption and help utility to reduce the peak load demand. Residential demand management can contribute to reduce peak electric demand, decrease electricity costs, and maintain grid reliability. Though the demand management has benefits to the utility and the consumers, controlling the consumers electricity consumption provides inconvenience to the consumers. The challenge here is to properly address the customers’ inconvenience to encourage them to participate and meanwhile satisfy the required demand reduction efficiently. In this work, new incentive-based demand management schemes for residential houses are designed and implemented. This work investigates two separate DR frameworks designed with different demand reduction coordination strategies. The first framework design constitutes a utility, several aggregators, and residential houses participating in DR program. Demand response potential (DRP), an indicator of whether an appliance can contribute to the DR, guides the strategic allocation of the demand limit to the aggregators. Each aggregator aggregates the DRP of all the controllable appliances under it and sends to the utility. The utility allocates different demand limits to the aggregators based on their respective DRP ratios. Participating residential customers are benefited with financial compensation with consideration of their inconvenience. Two scenarios are discussed in this approach with DRP. One where the thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) are controlled. The thermal comfort of residents and rewards are used to evaluate the demand response performance. The other scenario includes the time-shiftable appliances control with the same framework. The second framework is a three-level hierarchical control framework for large-scale residential DR with a novel bidding scheme and market-level analysis. It comprises of several residential communities, local controllers (LCs), a central controller (CC), and the electricity market. A demand reduction bidding strategy is introduced for the coordination among several LCs under a CC in this framework. Incentives are provided to the participating residential consumers, while considering their preferences, using a continuous reward structure. A simulation study on the 6-bus Roy Billinton Test System with 1;200 residential consumers demonstrates the financial benefits to both the electric utility and consumers

An exact solution method for binary equilibrium problems with compensation and the power market uplift problem

We propose a novel method to find Nash equilibria in games with binary decision variables by including compensation payments and incentive-compatibility constraints from non-cooperative game theory directly into an optimization framework in lieu of using first order conditions of a linearization, or relaxation of integrality conditions. The reformulation offers a new approach to obtain and interpret dual variables to binary constraints using the benefit or loss from deviation rather than marginal relaxations. The method endogenizes the trade-off between overall (societal) efficiency and compensation payments necessary to align incentives of individual players. We provide existence results and conditions under which this problem can be solved as a mixed-binary linear program. We apply the solution approach to a stylized nodal power-market equilibrium problem with binary on-off decisions. This illustrative example shows that our approach yields an exact solution to the binary Nash game with compensation. We compare different implementations of actual market rules within our model, in particular constraints ensuring non-negative profits (no-loss rule) and restrictions on the compensation payments to non-dispatched generators. We discuss the resulting equilibria in terms of overall welfare, efficiency, and allocational equity

Capturing Aggregate Flexibility in Demand Response

Flexibility in electric power consumption can be leveraged by Demand Response (DR) programs. The goal of this paper is to systematically capture the inherent aggregate flexibility of a population of appliances. We do so by clustering individual loads based on their characteristics and service constraints. We highlight the challenges associated with learning the customer response to economic incentives while applying demand side management to heterogeneous appliances. We also develop a framework to quantify customer privacy in direct load scheduling programs.Comment: Submitted to IEEE CDC 201

Public management and essential public health functions

The authors provide an overview of how different approaches to improving public sector management relate to so-called core or essential public health functions, such as disease surveillance, health education, monitoring and evaluation, workforce development, enforcement of public health laws and regulations, public health research, and health policy development. The authors summarize key themes in the public management literature and draw lessons for their application to these core functions.Decentralization,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Public Health Promotion,Enterprise Development&Reform,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,National Governance,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Banks&Banking Reform,Health Economics&Finance

MODELING OF AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS

The authors present an overview of agricultural systems models. Beginning with why systems are modeled and for what purposes, the paper examines types of agricultural systems and associated model types. The broad categories range from pictorial (iconic) models to descriptive analogue models to symbolic (usually mathematical) models. The uses of optimization versus non-optimizing mechanistic models are reviewed, as are the scale and aggregation challenges associated with scaling up from the plant cell to the landscape or from a farm enterprise to a world market supply-demand equilibrium Recent modeling developments include the integration of formerly stand-alone biophysical simulation models, increasingly with a unifying spatial database and often for the purpose of supporting management decisions. Current modeling innovations are estimating and incorporating environmental values and other system interactions. At the community and regional scale, sociological and economic models of rural community structure are being developed to evaluate long-term community viability. The information revolution is bringing new challenges in delivering agricultural systems models over the internet, as well as integrating decision support systems with the new precision agriculture technologies.Farm Management,

Best Practice in Performance Budgeting

This paper seeks to identify the best practice principles for performance budgeting. It describes and analyses the principle mechanisms by which performance budgeting systems attempt to link results and resources. These mechanisms are evaluated, drawing amongst other things upon analysis of the underlying relationship between results and resources. The potential scope for the integration of performance management and budgeting is considered.