Dynamic capacity control and balancing in the medium voltage grid (doctoral consortium)

Abstract

Renewable power sources such as wind and solar are inflexible in their energy production, which requires demand to rapidly follow supply in order to maintain energy balance. Promising controllable demands are air-conditioners and heat pumps which use electric energy to maintain a temperature at a setpoint. Such Thermostatically Controlled Loads (TCLs) have been shown to be able to follow a power curve using reactive control. In this project we investigate the use of planning under uncertainty to pro-actively control an aggregation of TCLs to overcome temporary grid imbalance. We model the planning problem under consideration using the Multi-Agent Markov Decision Process (MMDP) framework. Since we are dealing with hundreds of agents, solving the resulting MMDPs directly is intractable. Instead, we propose to research ways to decompose the problem by decoupling the interactions.