A decentralized approach to demand side load management: The Swiss2Grid project

We present the Swiss2Grid project, a pilot and demonstration aimed at evaluating the impact of different distributed demand management policies in Smart Grids. The increasing diffusion of decentralised energy generation, especially photovoltaics, can lead to severe imbalances on the electric grid, which could require huge investments in grid infrastructures. The approach proposed by the Swiss2Grid project is to adopt a decentralised approach to load management at the local level. Single households use a local algorithm that, based only on local voltage and frequency measures, shifts the pre-emptible loads in time in order to minimise the costs for the consumer and to maximise the grid stability. In this paper we present the project set-up in Mendrisio, a city in Southern Switzerland, we describe the algorithm principles, and finally we present some preliminary results showing the impact of the Swiss2Grid algorithm on the Low Voltage grid.