Frequency-responsive Load Management in Electric Power Grids: a Technical Concept for Demand Response in Smart Grids

Electricity systems worldwide are currently in a phase of change. The traditional centralized supply systems with a low number of large generators feeding millions of loads are more and more supplemented with distributed energy resources. These can be small generators, but also energy storages and especially active consumers. The future smart grid will much more rely on information and communication technology than today. The idea of demand side management, i.e. remote management of electrical loads in power grids is not new, but it was never of such importance as today that consumers actively contribute to grid operation. This work, targeting engineers and scientists in this area, proposes a concrete technical realisation of how electrical loads can take part in the existing balancing mechanisms of the grid using low bandwidth communication infrastructure. The proposed algorithm is based on a generalised storage model for short term energy storage on the demand side. An implementation is presented and a large scale application is compared to competing approaches in simulations.