3 research outputs found
Optimal Customer Targeting for Sustainable Demand Response in Smart Grids1
AbstractDemand Response (DR) is a widely used technique to minimize the peak to average consumption ratio during high demand periods. We consider the DR problem of achieving a given curtailment target for a set of consumers equipped with a set of discrete curtailment strategies over a given duration. An effective DR scheduling algorithm should minimize the curtailment error - the difference between the targeted and achieved curtailment values - to minimize costs to the utility provider and maintain system reliability. The availability of smart meters with fine-grained customer control capability can be leveraged to offer customers a dynamic range of curtailment strategies that are feasible for small durations within the overall DR event. Both the availability and achievable curtailment values of these strategies can vary dynamically through the DR event and thus the problem of achieving a target curtailment over the entire DR interval can be modeled as a dynamic strategy selection problem over multiple discrete sub-intervals. We argue that DR curtailment error minimizing algorithms should not be oblivious to customer curtailment behavior during sub-intervals as (expensive) demand peaks can be concentrated in a few sub-intervals while consumption is heavily curtailed during others in order to achieve the given target, which makes such solutions expensive for the utility. Thus in this paper, we formally develop the notion of Sustainable DR (SDR) as a solution that attempts to distribute the curtailment evenly across sub-intervals in the DR event. We formulate the SDR problem as an Integer Linear Program and provide a very fast -factor approximation algorithm. We then propose a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for approximating the SDR curtailment error to within an arbitrarily small factor of the optimal. We then develop a novel ILP formulation that solves the SDR problem while explicitly accounting for customer strategy switching overhead as a constraint. We perform experiments using real data acquired from the University of Southern Californias smart grid and show that our sustainable DR model achieves results with a very low absolute error of 0.001-0.05 kWh range
Optimal Net-Load Balancing in Smart Grids with High PV Penetration
Mitigating Supply-Demand mismatch is critical for smooth power grid
operation. Traditionally, load curtailment techniques such as Demand Response
(DR) have been used for this purpose. However, these cannot be the only
component of a net-load balancing framework for Smart Grids with high PV
penetration. These grids can sometimes exhibit supply surplus causing
over-voltages. Supply curtailment techniques such as Volt-Var Optimizations are
complex and computationally expensive. This increases the complexity of
net-load balancing systems used by the grid operator and limits their
scalability. Recently new technologies have been developed that enable the
rapid and selective connection of PV modules of an installation to the grid.
Taking advantage of these advancements, we develop a unified optimal net-load
balancing framework which performs both load and solar curtailment. We show
that when the available curtailment values are discrete, this problem is
NP-hard and develop bounded approximation algorithms for minimizing the
curtailment cost. Our algorithms produce fast solutions, given the tight timing
constraints required for grid operation. We also incorporate the notion of
fairness to ensure that curtailment is evenly distributed among all the nodes.
Finally, we develop an online algorithm which performs net-load balancing using
only data available for the current interval. Using both theoretical analysis
and practical evaluations, we show that our net-load balancing algorithms
provide solutions which are close to optimal in a small amount of time.Comment: 11 pages. To be published in the 4th ACM International Conference on
Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys 17) Changes from
previous version: Fixed a bug in Algorithm 1 which was causing some min cost
solutions to be misse