Autonomous Demand Response in Heterogeneous Smart Grid Topologies

Abstract

Autonomous demand response (DR) is scalable and has minimal control overhead on utilities by encouraging users to minimize their own energy expenditure. While the prior results on autonomous DR are promising, they are all limited to homogeneous grid topologies, such as a microgrid or a small distribution feeder. In this paper, we take the first step to investigate autonomous DR in heterogeneous grid topologies, i.e., a macrogrid, where users who participate in autonomous DR programs are scattered across different buses. Our analysis requires expanding the existing autonomous DR to also include power flow analysis across the power grid. To gain insight, we perform two analytical case studies and show that the results can be very different from the results previously reported on homogeneous autonomous DR systems. We also provide recommendations to design efficient, fair, and practical autonomous demand response systems in heterogeneous smart grid topologies.