Matching demand with supply and regulating frequency
are key issues in power system operations. Flexibility
and local frequency measurement capability of loads offer new regulation mechanisms through load control. We present a
frequency-based fast load control scheme which aims to match
total demand with supply while minimizing the global end-use
disutility. Local frequency measurement enables loads to make decentralized decisions on their power from the estimates of total demand-supply mismatch. To resolve the errors in such estimates caused by stochastic frequency measurement errors, loads communicate via a neighborhood area network. Case studies show that the proposed load control can balance demand with supply and restore the frequency at the timescale faster than AGC, even when the loads use a highly simplified system model in their algorithms. Moreover, we discuss the tradeoff between communication and performance, and show with experiments that a moderate amount of communication significantly improves the performance
