Summer peak demand within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which serves about 90% of Texas’ electric load, has increased significantly over the past decade. A new record for greatest hourly peak demand (74.5 GW) was created between 4 pm and 5 pm on August 12, 2019. Population growth, urbanization, economic expansion, and climate change are some of the major reasons for this increase. The residential sector, and particularly air-conditioning load, contributes about 50% of the Texas summer peak. Maintaining balance between supply and increasing peak demand often necessitates the construction of expensive generation, distribution, and transmission infrastructure (which might not be used for a majority of the year when demand is lower) and usage of diesel generators which are not environmentally friendly. Demand response and increased penetration of distributed energy resources, like onsite solar and storage, can potentially curb peak demand without any operating emissions.

            This study uses a linear optimization framework to evaluate the effect of different demand response (DR)/load control mechanisms on reduction in peak load and energy consumption from the electricity grid in a home with four major controllable appliances - HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems, electric water heaters (EWHs), electric vehicles (EVs), and pool pumps (PPs). Two incentive-based DR methods and four price-based DR schemes - real time pricing (RTP), time-of-use (TOU) rates, critical peak prices (CPP), and variable peak prices (VPP) - are analyzed. Load reduction potential is evaluated for scenarios where the home has both onsite solar and storage, only solar, and no solar or storage. Savings in electricity bills and overall expenditure to the residential customer for each of these DR schemes are also recorded. Results show that, from the utility’s perspective, the optimal load control schemes, which result in greatest reduction in peak load and energy consumption from the grid during peak hours, are CPP and VPP (critical price option). From the customer’s perspective, the VPP (high price option) results in greatest savings in overall expenditure by encouraging customers to reduce energy consumption during the peak hours (and/or shift consumption to non-peak hours when the price is lower than the constant rate) without affecting customer comfort levels significantly. By considering the combined effect of demand response, solar generation, and energy storage systems, this study aims to equip electric utilities with the ability to make decisions about dynamic rate design and direct load control to curtail peak demand and shift energy usage.


Energetic and Economic Potential for Load Control for Residential Customers in Austin, TX

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

IMECE2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.