Implementation of heterogeneous load aggregation and control for peak shaving
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Date
2022-04
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University of New Brunswick
Abstract
Power consumption peaks during specific periods of the day, generating an electricity supply and demand imbalance and an increase in electricity generation costs. To shave the peak load, this research work proposes a load control strategy using an aggregator for demand side management (DSM) of a population of heterogeneous thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs). TCLs that can be used for this purpose with direct load control (DLC) include electric baseboard heaters (EBHs), electric water heaters (EWHs), and electric thermal storage units (ETSs). The responsibility of the aggregator is to determine control actions using ON/OFF commands and setpoint (SP) variation for the connected TCLs. The aggregator communicates with an upper-level management system to ensure load balancing is satisfied for the overall power network. For this research, the TCL types mentioned above were used to form the heterogeneous aggregation. The research work is implemented and simulated in MATLAB, where the performance of the proposed heterogeneous aggregator was compared against a combination of individual homogeneous aggregators with access to only a single TCL type. The results demonstrated that the heterogeneous aggregator is capable of better peak reduction capabilities for shorter peak durations and produces better overall user comfort when compared to the homogenous aggregators.