On the use of teletraffic theory in power distribution systems

Loads on the electrical grid are multiplexed at distribution transformers in the same way that traffic from data sources is multiplexed at a router. This motivates the use of teletraffic theory to size power distribution networks just as it is used to size telecommunication access networks. Specifically, we prove the equivalence between a model of a distribution branch comprised of a transformer and storage that we want to size for a given underflow probability ϵ, and a queuing model that we want to size for a given overflow probability ϵ. Based on this equivalence, we show how existing teletraffic analysis can be applied to size transformers when there is no storage. We compute such sizings using load models obtained from our measurement testbed and load models derived from an electricity demand simulator. We show not only that teletraffic theory agrees well with numerical simulations but also that it closely matches with the heuristics used in current practice by electric utilities, thus validating the use of teletraffic theory.