"Modeling Smart Grid Systems"
Monday, November 9, 2009, 01:00 PM
Engineering Building, Viking Lab (B205)

Modeling Smart Grid Systems: Coordinating Flexibility from Residential Electricity Demand to Aid Smart Grid Operations

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Join us for a Smart Grid faculty candidate seminar presentation by Daniel Livengood titled, "Modeling Smart Grid Systems: Coordinating Flexibility from Residential Electricity Demand to Aid Smart Grid Operations."

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Abstract

Depending on whom you ask, the smart grid could include anything and everything from large wind farms and high-voltage transmission lines down to the thermostat in your home. Modeling and simulating the interactions on the electric grid at various levels of space and time are necessary to understand how best to operate the electric grid as it evolves into the smart grid.

I will discuss my research on one of the smaller units on the smart grid: the individual residence. I will introduce what we call the Energy Box, which is proposed as a 24/7 background processor operating on a local computer or in a remote location, silently managing one’s home electrical energy usage hour-by-hour and even minute-by-minute.

We assume that the residence has some combination of (1) addressable and controllable appliances, (2) local storage (including plug-in electric vehicles), and (3) weather-dependent distributed generation. We also consider the possibility of retail electricity consumers facing time-varying pricing of electricity.

Our primary integrating method of optimization and control given the uncertainties of time-varying pricing and weather-dependent distributed generation is stochastic dynamic programming. From these assumptions, I will discuss tradeoffs between benefits to the consumer versus benefits to the smart grid, as well as tradeoffs between control strategies that consider controlling one appliance at a time versus coordinated control across multiple appliances and storage devices in the home.

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Event Contact: Brett Eppich Beal can be reached at (970) 218-9386

Sponsored by the College of Engineering.