Abstract
The philosophy of Energy Management has been developed in order to improve operational and economic efficiencies in the supply of electrical energy at the times of peak demands. These peaks last for only a short time and are costly for the supply authority. Energy Management attempts to shift the use of electrical energy from the times of peak demand to those times where the level of the load is relatively low.
There are two distinct divisions within Energy Management which fulfil this requirement: indirect and direct load control. First, through the pricing of electricity, large industrial and commercial consumers can react indirectly in response to pre-published tariffs or to spot prices. Second, the supply authority could employ direct control of suitable domestic appliances. This would require a communications facility between the supplier and the consumer terminal equipment which could be remotely controlled. This paper analyses and simulates the effects of the introduction of a direct load-control strategy. The load to be controlled would be domestic appliances which are modelled by employing a stochastic approach. This would identify the available level of controllable load at any time of the day.
The principal effects of Energy Management are the improvement of system load factors and the reduction of peak loads, thus improving the supply economies and efficiencies. For the consumer, Energy Management could reduce the energy costs for domestic customers with minimal inconvenience, provided that the control strategy is chosen with care.
The paper presents an adaptive-time-series model for short-term load forecasting and incorporates the appliance models in order to estimate the expected response of the domestic load to transmitted control signals. Simulations of simple control strategies are presented showing the avoidance of potentially difficult conditions of simultaneous reconnection of the controlled load.
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