Practical Challenges in Real-time Demand Response

TL;DR

This paper investigates practical challenges in implementing real-time demand response with 100 devices, identifying key issues and proposing a control strategy that improves system performance validated through hardware-in-the-loop tests.

Contribution

It introduces a two-level control structure addressing real-world challenges in demand response, including delays and nonlinearities, validated by hardware-in-the-loop testing.

Findings

Identified key practical challenges such as delays and nonlinearities.

Developed a multi-loop control strategy that reduces steady-state errors.

Validated the approach with hardware-in-the-loop experiments.

Abstract

We report on a real-time demand response experiment with 100 controllable devices. The experiment reveals several key challenges in the deployment of a real-time demand response program, including time delays, uncertainties, characterization errors, multiple timescales, and nonlinearity, which have been largely ignored in previous studies. To resolve these practical issues, we develop and implement a two-level multi-loop control structure integrating feed-forward proportional-integral controllers and optimization solvers in closed loops, which eliminates steady-state errors and improves the dynamical performance of the overall building response. The proposed methods are validated by Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) tests.