Energy supply aware power planning for flexible loads

Abstract

Increasing the use of renewable energy is considered a viable way of reducing carbon intensive power generation. However, a power grid running on high amounts of renewable energy has to deal with the limited controllability and higher volatility of power sources like wind or solar. In this work, we propose to use demand side management to deal with varying amounts of renewable power feed-in via the use of power plans, i.e. instructions passed to large energy consumers that specify how they should try to spread out their energy use over a day. We argue that a separation of power planning and implementation of technical measures to schedule loads to follow the plan would alleviate some of the problems faced by an integrated planning-scheduling approach, as these processes are governed by different entities who may be unwilling to disclose all required information to each other. As a proof-of-concept, we propose and analyze a quadratic programming approach to maximizing the fraction of renewable energy being used while not overburdening the consumer with a power plan that is difficult to follow.