I-Corps: Fast Timescale Residential Demand Response

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of software technology enabling residential electric loads to provide fast services to the power systems. These services improve electricity reliability and also may help the grid incorporate more renewable energy, reducing the environmental impact of electricity generation and delivery. Near-term applications include fast timescale load reductions utilities paying for transmission costs based on a utility’s portion of the total demand during specific periods. Longer-term applications include capacity upgrade deferments in electricity distribution networks, frequency regulation resources in wholesale markets, reduction of renewable energy curtailment, providing ramping capability, and so on. Using electric loads to provide these services may be more cost-effective than building/using other resources such as traditional generation, transmission, or distribution equipment, or energy storage. This I-Corps project is to explore translation of control algorithms that enable rapid cycling of residential compressor-based electric loads (e.g., air conditioners). Rapid cycling on fast timescales allows aggregations of these loads to provide services to power systems through changes in their total power consumption, but currently this is difficult as rapid on/off cycling can damage the equipment. Existing companies simply avoid controlling these devices for services that require this speed of switching signals. The proposed novel control algorithms avoid damaging the equipment while enabling control on these fast timescales (e.g., every second). In addition, estimation and inference strategies can enable control without the need for pervasive high-resolution sensing and communication networks, reducing the cost of control.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.