The increasing penetration of variable renewable generation raises new challenges in maintaining the reliability, resilience, and stability of modern electric power grids. To properly harness renewable energy and address these challenges, grid services from customers will likely increasingly play essential roles. Compared with traditional generation (e.g., from natural gas, nuclear, and hydropower), buildings equipped with modern communications, monitoring, control, and communication/computation technologies could potentially provide grid services quicker and at lower costs. Lighting in the residential and commercial sectors uses about 232 billion kWh of electricity annually in the US. Lighting, if properly controlled, may contribute to several types of grid services.We describe initial research exploring the potential of connected lighting systems (CLS) to provide the grid service of frequency regulation, taking CLS in a representative medium office as an example. CLS, based on solid-state lighting technology and equipped with advanced sensors, controllers, and communications, can rapidly change their power demand and thus provide grid services intervals, such as frequency regulation. Aggregation of CLS in a large number of buildings would be required to qualify for participation in the frequency reserve markets; however, the minimum power limit for participation has been decreased considerably by FERC rule 2222 published in September 2020, opening potential participation of smaller providers through aggregation.&nbsp;A model for CLS is developed to characterize their potential to provide grid services, using a set of parameters to represent operation behaviors and constraints: maximum power, minimum power, nominal power, maximum ramp rate, and time delay. Parameter values are generated for five representative CLS categories.Frequency regulation is a reliability product that corrects in a matter of seconds for short-term changes in the balance between supply and demand in the balancing area that might affect the stability of the power system. Frequency regulation signals for a medium office building are generated from the normalized test signals for the PJM Interconnection RegA and RegD regulations services. RegA is a signal based on low-pass filtering of the PJM area control error (ACE) signal while RegD is a faster varying signal based on high-pass filtering of the ACE signal. Control of the CLS locally to follow the RegA or RegD signal is used to track the signal and provide contributions to the corresponding frequency regulation service.The performance of CLS for frequency regulation is evaluated using the PJM 40-Minute Performance Score Template applied to data from the simulated response of the models for each CLS category. Four scores are provided by this analysis: a correlation score, delay score, precision score, and an overall performance score. The performance scores obtained for all CLS categories exceeded 98% for RegA and 94% for the higher frequency RegD both of which far exceed the minimum score for the qualification of 78%, very promising result for CLS to provide frequency regulation service.

Frequency Regulation With Connected Lighting Systems

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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