Aashiyana: Design and Evaluation of a Smart Demand-Response System for Highly-stressed Grids

TL;DR

This paper introduces Aashiyana, a demand-response system for highly-stressed power grids that enables multiple low-power states, significantly reducing blackout durations and improving grid stability.

Contribution

Aashiyana is a novel building-level demand-response system allowing multiple low-power states, improving upon binary load-shedding strategies in stressed grids.

Findings

Reduces homes with no power by 80%

Enables multiple low-power states

Improves load-shedding efficiency

Abstract

This paper targets the unexplored problem of demand response within the context of power-grids that are allowed to regularly enforce blackouts as a mean to balance supply with demand:highly-stressed grids. Currently these utilities use as a cyclic and binary (power/no-power) schedule over consumer groups leading to significant wastage of capacity and long hours of no-power. We present here a novel building DLC system, Aashiyana, that can enforce several user-defined low-power states. We evaluate distributed and centralized load-shedding schemes using Aashiyana that can, compared to current load-shedding strategy, reduce the number of homes with no power by 80% for minor change in the fraction of homes with full-power.