Transactive Control of Air Conditioning Loads for Mitigating Microgrid Tie-line Power Fluctuations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed transactive control strategy for air conditioning loads to mitigate microgrid tie-line power fluctuations, emphasizing baseline load management, robustness, and customer comfort.

Contribution

It proposes a novel low-pass filter based algorithm and transactive control method for ACLs, improving robustness, privacy, and reducing control complexity.

Findings

ACLs effectively smooth tie-line power fluctuations

The control strategy maintains customer comfort and privacy

Simulation confirms the method's robustness and efficiency

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed control strategy for air conditioning loads (ACLs) to participate in the scheme of mitigating microgrid tie-line power fluctuations. The concept of baseline load is emphasized for ACL control in this paper. To obtain the target aggregated power of ACLs, an algorithm based on the principle of low-pass filter (LPF) is derived. For better robustness of the control strategy, feedback of the states of indoor temperatures is introduced for baseline load correction. A transactive control method is then put forward to allocate the target aggregated power to each ACL. This method can satisfy customers' differentiated requirements for comfort, protect the privacy and enhance the security of the controlled appliances. For the microgrid control center, it can simplify the downlink control and avoid measuring the power of uncontrolled loads which reduces the implementation cost. Simulation results shows ACLs can effectively provide microgrid tie-line smoothing services using the proposed method.