Grid integration of distributed renewables through coordinated demand response

There is a growing interest in developing solutions to facilitate large scale integration of distributed renewable energy resources and, in particular, contain the adverse effects of their volatility. In this paper, we introduce a neighborhood-level demand response program that aims at coordinating the Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) of residential customers in order to opportunistically consume spikes of locally generated renewable energy. We refer to this technique as Coordinated Home Energy Management (CoHEM). Our model predictive control technique modulates the aggregate load to follow a dynamically forecasted generation supply. Both centralized and decentralized deployments of CoHEM are considered. The decentralized version requires a more demanding communication backbone to connect individual HEMS but, it is more resilient to failures of individual computational units or communication links and, compared to the centralized model, it preserves consumers privacy. In our numerical results section, we compare the scenario where individual HEMS optimize their energy use selfishly, under a hypothetical dynamic pricing program, to the performance of the centralized and decentralized versions of our proposed CoHEM architecture. The results highlight the advantages of using the CoHEM model in absorbing the fluctuations in the generation output of distributed renewables.