Demand dispatch for renewable energy integration in Prosumer Smart Grids

With high penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources, the modern power grid is becoming increasingly difficult to manage due to the erratic nature of these sources. Supply and demand balance, which is crucial to power system stability, is thus more challenging to sustain. The situation is exacerbated by an increase in prosumers, who consume electricity and sometimes send energy back to the grid. With regard to maintaining this balance, direct control of loads, known as demand dispatch, and conventional dispatch of generation are complementary. Hence, a coordinated dispatch of both supply and demand resources is presented in this chapter. We develop a mathematical model of the operational dynamics of a prosumer smart grid and formulate the problem of power balance as a constrained optimization problem whose solution minimizes the operating cost of the grid and achieves power balance by implementing demand dispatch. Our formulation is solved with Advanced Interactive Multidimensional Modeling System (AIMMS) outer approximation module using data for Ontario's grid network. The performance of our formulation is tested and results obtained authenticate the effectiveness of demand dispatch strategies in achieving supply and demand dispatch in prosumer smart grids. Furthermore, we show that demand dispatch curtails the adverse effects of the randomness of renewable energy generation.