Characterizing Electric Grid System Benefits of MPC-Based Residential Load Shaping: Preprint

Routinely encouraging and discouraging residential electric load throughout the day will be increasingly critical in efficiently managing the smart grid to reliably deliver clean, low-cost electricity. Yet, manipulating the duty cycles of thermostatically controlled loads such as heating, air conditioning, and hot water heaters can have the effect of destabilizing or stabilizing the grid. This work explores the potential for price-responsive control of residential air conditioning to shape electric demand at the distribution feeder level to minimize electricity production costs. Physical models of the interplay between building thermal and electric loads are used to Simulate time-series temperature and load behavior. Instantaneous load-adding and load-shedding opportunities are quantified in more than 100,000 individual homes on 204 distribution feeders with results presented for 35 cities across the United States. In the context of distributed model predictive control, simulation of feeder-level response to a residential day-ahead 5-minute pricing vector to 2,146 homes highlights an aggregate impact of flexible loads.