Demand Response under Renewable Generation Fluctuations Considering Customer Discomfort

Demand side management can play a pivotal role in balancing the supply and demand. Application of demand re-sponse (DR) facilitates load reduction or load shifting at peak demand times. A utility facing under frequency drop issue when its generation capability is lower than the power demand can employ DR. However, every DR action in either form of dim-ming, delaying, or disconnecting loads basically reduces the cus-tomers' comfort level. This study presents a DR strategy for the group of controllable and shed-able loads that minimizes customer discomfort. As such, the customer comfort limits are predefined as the reference for the DR's execution. The proposed DR algorithm aims to minimize the standard deviation of com-fort reduction among the controllable loads and minimizes the number of loads to be shed, using discrete combinatorial optimi-zation. The DR algorithm is executed sequentially from the least to the higher priority load so that loads with higher priority are less affected. Simulation results indicate that the proposed DR strategy has evenly distributed customer comfort reductions among the controllable loads while the number of shed loads is minimized.