Pacific Northwest GridWise? Testbed Demonstration Projects; Part II. Grid Friendly? Appliance Project

Abstract

Fifty residential electric water heaters and 150 new residential clothes dryers were modified to respond to signals received from underfrequency, load-shedding appliance controllers. Each controller monitored the power-grid voltage signal and requested that electrical load be shed by its appliance whenever electric power-grid frequency fell below 59.95 Hz. The controllers and their appliances were installed and monitored for more than a year at residential sites at three locations in Washington and Oregon. The controllers and their appliances responded reliably to each shallow underfrequency eventan average of one event per day-and shed their loads for the durations of these events. Appliance owners reported that the appliance responses were unnoticed and caused little or no inconvenience for the homes' occupants.

Convergent Double Auction Mechanism for a Prosumers’ Decentralized Smart Grid

“…Electricity network concepts employing emergent smart grid technologies are gathering attention [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Reducing our dependency on thermal power generation based on fossil fuel and introducing renewables-based distributed energy resources (DERs), such as photovoltaic (PV) cells, wind turbines and batteries, into our residential areas will change our total electric power systems in the future [7].…”

“…To balance demand and supply in residential electricity networks based on renewables-based DERs, the information technologies and economics methods that encourage suppliers and consumers to behave so as to stabilize the network and to maximize its social welfare are promising. In this context, market-based decentralized control methods are attracting attention in the research field of smart grids [1][2][3][4][5][15][16][17][18].…”

A practical integration of automatic generation control and Demand Response

“…Many control strategies such as [7]- [10] adjust loads based on local frequency, enabling loads to mimic the natural response of synchronous generators. These approaches have been shown to improve the primary frequency response of the grid in both simulations and in small-scale field tests [11]. However, one of the challenges with load control is balancing the objectives of consumers with those of the grid [4], and so the cost (or disutility) to consumers must also be considered.…”

Smart plugs: A low cost solution for programmable control of domestic loads

“…However, despite the many proposals in the literature for demand response approaches [1] or direct load control [2], [3], the control of residential users' energy demand (which significantly affect the overall energy load variability [4]) is still limited to pilot projects [5], [6] with little penetration perspective in the near future. The reason is that the implementation of these mechanisms requires investments (for updating user appliances and communication infrastructures) which are not clearly justified for the end users.…”