Evaluating the impact of distributed solar powers on coordinated demand side management

Demand side management (DSM) has been one of the enabling technologies for the smart grid systems. This paper considers the coordinated DSM (CoDSM) technique where a load aggregator coordinates the energy consumption of a neighborhood with large numbers of customers, in order to achieve real-time power balance. The deferrable loads (such as the Plug-in (Hybrid) Electric Vehicles (PHEV) and washing machine etc.) are considered. Our main interest lies in integrating the distributed energy sources (RES), specifically the distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) powers, in the CoDSM program and evaluating the impact of RES on the power balance performance. The solar powers are modeled as autoregressive (AR) random processes and can be predicted in a real-time fashion. A rolling-window based realtime CoDSM algorithm is presented, which can exploit both real-time and predicted solar power information in the load scheduling process. Simulation results based on real solar power data are presented to examine the performance of CoDSM with different levels of solar power penetration.