Distributed flexibility management targeting energy cost and total power limitations in electricity distribution grids

Demand Management uses the interaction and information exchange between multiple control functions in order to achieve goals that can vary in different application contexts. Since there are several stakeholders involved, these may have diverse objectives and even use different architectures to actively manage power demand. This paper utilizes an existing distributed demand management architecture in order to provide the following contributions: (1) It develops and evaluates a set of algorithms that combine the optimization of energy costs in scenarios of variable day-ahead prices with the goal to improve distribution grid operation reliability, here implemented by a total Power limit. (2) It evaluates the proposed scheme as a distributed system where flexibility information is exchanged with the existing industry standard OpenADR. A Hardware-in-the-Loop testbed realization demonstrates the convergence and effectiveness of the approach and quantitatively shows a power quality improvement in the distribution grid.