Self-Organizing Demand Response with Comfort-Constrained Heat Pumps

Abstract

The increasing pervasion of information and communication technology (ICT) in the power grid motivates innovative research towards intelligent system control. Especially against the background of the growing share of renewable generation, novel approaches that mitigate e. g. grid expansion costs are of great interest. In this paper, the self-organized and thus completely distributed control concept COHDA for the online scheduling of responsive loads is employed as an alternative to the traditional centralized control. By distributing the decision making process, no global state information about the participating devices has to be gathered beforehand. The proposed approach is applied to the mitigation of wind power fluctuations on a minute basis by controllable heat pumps. Simulation results indicate that even in the presence of moderate time delays between wind power measurements and the resulting control action from the responsive population (i. e. including the distributed scheduling process), a significant reduction of fluctuations can be achieved.