Challenges and opportunities in large-scale deployment of automated energy consumption scheduling systems in smart grids

Recent studies have shown that the lack of knowledge among users on how to respond to time-varying prices and the lack of effective home automation systems are two major barriers for fully utilizing the advantages of real-time pricing. Therefore, there has been a growing interest over the past few years towards developing automated energy consumption scheduling (ECS) devices to constantly monitor the hourly prices and schedule the operation of users´ controllable load to minimize their energy expenditure. While the prior results in using ECS devices are promising, all prior work are limited to small-scale deployment of ECS devices. For example, in most cases, the users that are equipped with the ECS devices are assumed to be part of a microgrid or a feeder connected to a sub-station. In this paper, we rather investigate large-scale deployment of ECS devices in a power grid with several buses and generators. The price of electricity at each bus is set according to the locational marginal price (LMP) at that bus. We show that a key challenge in large-scale deployment of ECS devices is load synchronization. However, we propose to use a moving average smoothing mechanism for LMPs that can fix the load synchronization problem and stabilize the system. Furthermore, we show that the proposed large-scale ECS system has a close to optimal performance in terms of reducing peak-to-average-ratio in load demand, minimizing the total power generation cost, and lowering users´ electricity bills.