Probabilistic Approach for Renewable Energy Integration: Virtual Storage from Flexible Loads – PARI

This project is motivated by current and projected needs of a power grid with significant renewable energy integration.
Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar have a high degree of unpredictability and time variation, which makes balancing demand and supply challenging. There is an increased need for ancillary services to smooth the volatility of renewable power.
In the absence of large, expensive batteries, we may have to increase our inventory of responsive fossil-fuel generators, negating the environmental benefits of renewable energy.

The proposed approach addresses this challenge by harnessing the inherent flexibility in demand of many types of loads. The objective of the project is to develop decentralized control for automated demand dispatch,
%based on probabilistic algorithms and control theory,
that can be used by grid operators as ancillary service to regulate demand-supply balance at low cost. We call the resource obtained from these techniques virtual energy storage (VES). Our goal is to create the necessary ancillary services for the grid that are environmentally friendly, that have low cost and that do not impact the quality of service (QoS) for the consumers. Besides respecting the needs of the loads, the aim of the project is to design local control solutions that require minimal communications from the loads to the centralized entity. %, with the aim of respecting the privacy of users.
This is possible through a systems architecture that includes the following elements: i) local control at each load based on local measurements combined with a grid-level signal; ii) frequency decomposition of the regulation signal based on QoS and physical constraints for each class of loads.