i13DR: A Real-Time Demand Response Infrastructure for Integrating Renewable Energy Resources

TL;DR

This paper presents a software-based, real-time demand response system for laptops that helps integrate renewable energy sources into power grids by controlling and estimating power consumption to match supply fluctuations.

Contribution

It introduces a distributed, software-only infrastructure for real-time demand response on laptops, reducing costs and addressing challenges of integrating renewable energy.

Findings

Successfully schedules and executes rapid demand response events

Reduces initial costs for demand side participants

Achieves effective control despite low estimation accuracy

Abstract

With the ongoing integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES), the complexity of power grids is increasing. Due to the fluctuating nature of RES, ensuring the reliability of power grids can be challenging. One possible approach for addressing these challenges is Demand Response (DR) which is described as matching the demand for electrical energy according to the changes and the availability of supply. However, implementing a DR system to monitor and control a broad set of electrical appliances in real-time introduces several new complications, including ensuring the reliability and financial feasibility of the system. In this work, we address these issues by designing and implementing a distributed real-time DR infrastructure for laptops, which estimates and controls the power consumption of a network of connected laptops in response to the fast, irregular changes of RES. Furthermore, since our approach is entirely software-based, we dramatically reduce the initial costs of the demand side participants. The result of our field experiments confirms that our system successfully schedules and executes rapid and effective DR events. However, the accuracy of the estimated power consumption of all participating laptops is relatively low, directly caused by our software-based approach.