Load recognition for automated demand response in microgrids

Microgrids are well-suited for electrification of remote off-grid areas. This paper sketches the concept of a plug-and-play microgrid with a minimum of configuration effort needed for setup. When the load of such an off-grid microgrid grows over the generation capacity and energy storage is not sufficient, demand has to be reduced to prevent a blackout. In order to decide which loads are inessential and can be shedded, automated load recognition on the basis of measured power consumption profiles is needed. Two promising approaches from the area of speech recognition, Dynamic Time Warping and Hidden Markov Models, are compared for this application. It is found that a key feature to achieve good recognition efficiency is a careful selection of the features extracted from the measured power data.