Distributed Scheduling of Home Appliances to Flatten Peak Demand in Microgrids and Enhancements

Abstract

The primary power grids provide electricity to cities, businesses, and industries. In addition to the primary power grids, there exist smaller, independent grids called microgrids or remote grids that provide electricity to islands, rural areas, remote areas, or small communities. Because micro-grids limited capacity for power generation, flattening the peak power demand is one of the significant challenges. We focus on peak demand flattening using the power-voltage relationship approach out of the available solutions. Specifically, we observe that the existing algorithms for flattening peak demand using a distributed water heater scheduling algorithm suffer from the following drawbacks, 1. It generates short-term ON/OFF events, which are unsuitable for electrical appliances 2. It does not guarantee performance in distributed scheduling 3. Finally, it has severe consequences if water usage prediction goes wrong. Therefore, we propose a new algorithm that overcomes the problem of short-term ON/OFF events. In addition, we verified that at any given instance in time, fewer homes keep their water heater ON simultaneously without affecting the hot water usage of targeted users.