Emulating Batteries with Deferrable Energy Demand: Fundamental Trade-offs and Scheduling Policies

TL;DR

This paper explores how collections of deferrable energy loads can mimic battery behavior, revealing fundamental trade-offs and proposing dynamic policies to optimize energy absorption and release capabilities.

Contribution

It derives explicit bounds on emulated battery capacity and introduces new feedback policies to balance energy absorption and release abilities.

Findings

Explicit bounds on emulated battery capacity

Fundamental trade-off between absorption and release rates

Dynamic priority policies effectively emulate battery behavior

Abstract

We investigate the ability of a homogeneous collection of deferrable energy loads to behave as a battery; that is, to absorb and release energy in a controllable fashion up to fixed and predetermined limits on volume, charge rate and discharge rate. We derive explicit bounds on the battery capacity that can be offered, and show that there is a fundamental trade-off between the abilities of collective load to absorb and release energy at high aggregate rates. Finally, we introduce a new class of dynamic priority-driven feedback policies that balance these abilities, and characterize the batteries that they can emulate.