A consumer-orientated Architecture for distributed Demand-Side-Optimization

Abstract

Demand-Side-Management (DSM) is one of the key applications in the future smart grid, creating a new degree of control in order to reduce losses and fluctuations caused by volatile distributed energy resources (DERs). To integrate the consumer side, several approaches like flexible tariffs, have been proposed and tested. However, many of these approaches not have been adopted widely yet because of the needed sophisticated (and often expensive) command and control infrastructures or their impact on the user comfort. In this paper an architectural approach for a lightweight demand-side-application will be proposed. Utilizing methods of peer-to-peer (p2p) networks and abstraction patterns the architecture will be enabling consumers to form spontaneous demand-side optimization networks in order to optimize their load and to provide energy services to the Smart Grid of the future. Because of the decentralized characteristic of the architecture, the aggregation instance does not need detailed information of the optimization network, while the approach is scalable.