Kameshwar Poolla (University of California, Berkeley)
The Future Grid: Renewables, Regulation, and Control
Pressing environmental problems, energy supply security issues, and nuclear power safety concerns drive the worldwide interest in renewable energy. Variability in renewable generation is the most important obstacle to deep integration of renewable generation. The current approach is to absorb this variability in operating reserves. This works at today’s modest penetration levels. But it will not scale. At deep penetration levels, the levels of necessary reserves are economically untenable, and defeat the net carbon benefit.
So how can we economically enable deep penetration of renewable generation? The emerging consensus is that much this new generation must be placed at millions of points in the distribution system, and that the attendant variability can be absorbed by the coordinated aggregation of distributed resources such as storage and flexible loads. Tomorrow’s grid will have an intelligent periphery. We will explore the architectural and algorithmic components for managing this intelligent periphery for flexible load management. We consider two classes of flexible loads: electric vehicles and thermostatically controlled loads.In each case, we show that the aggregate flexibility can be modeled as electricity storage. Uncertainty from ambient conditions, availability, and other factors require us to treat the storage model stochastically. This simple, portable model greatly simplifies regulation procurement. Upstream, it isolates the system operator from the load details, and downstream it allows handling AGC commands from the system operator as operational constraints. We close by suggesting several challenging problems in monetizing and incentivizing resource participation.