Modelling the ability of customer loads to track the output of renewable generation

Future smart grids are anticipated to accommodate a variety of distributed generation sources including intermittent renewable sources. Smart grids will also include demand management resources and the widespread communications and control technologies required to use demand response to help maintain the supply-demand balance in electricity systems at a variety of time scales. To incorporate this in system design and analysis, demand response needs to be supported by a scientific methodology based on analysis and models verifiable by experiment. Towards this aim, this paper presents a method for modelling customer appliances and comercial loads and an approximate bound on the ability of a system of such loads to balance variable energy supply.