A Two-Layer Near-Optimal Strategy for Substation Constraint Management via Home Batteries

TL;DR

This paper proposes a two-layer control strategy for home batteries that effectively manages substation constraints with near-optimal efficiency, avoiding direct user device control and demonstrating high performance in real-world simulations.

Contribution

A novel hierarchical control method for home batteries that balances efficiency and user privacy, achieving near-optimal substation constraint management without direct device control.

Findings

Achieves at least 82% of the optimal centralized strategy efficiency.

Effective in managing substation constraints in real-world household data.

Demonstrates practical viability with field data from Denmark.

Abstract

Within electrical distribution networks, substation constraints management requires that aggregated power demand from residential users is kept within suitable bounds. Efficiency of substation constraints management can be measured as the reduction of constraints violations w.r.t. unmanaged demand. Home batteries hold the promise of enabling efficient and user-oblivious substation constraints management. Centralized control of home batteries would achieve optimal efficiency. However, it is hardly acceptable by users, since service providers (e.g., utilities or aggregators) would directly control batteries at user premises. Unfortunately, devising efficient hierarchical control strategies, thus overcoming the above problem, is far from easy. We present a novel two-layer control strategy for home batteries that avoids direct control of home devices by the service provider and at the same time yields near-optimal substation constraints management efficiency. Our simulation results on field data from 62 households in Denmark show that the substation constraints management efficiency achieved with our approach is at least 82% of the one obtained with a theoretical optimal centralized strategy.