Duck-curve Mitigation in Power Grids with High Penetration of PV Generation

Small-scale PV generation has become popular with residential customers in several jurisdictions with high solar radiation, as an alternative to improve their carbon footprint and reduce their electricity bills. However, massive deployment of such distributed generation is creating a particular and undesirable shape in the net demand, which deepens at hours of peak solar PV injections at noon and suddenly rises towards the evening, known as the “duck curve”. Hence, this paper investigates the use of pre-cooling strategies in residential households to mitigate the duck-curve effects. To this aim, appropriate thermal models and simulations of houses are first developed and carried out to demonstrate the technical feasibility of pre-cooling in a house with a typical configuration, based on the Smart Residential Load Simulator (SRLS) developed at the University of Waterloo. Then, an aggregation technique is proposed to evaluate the effects on a large grid of different penetration levels of PV, and pre-cooling approaches to manage the duck-curve in California and Texas, concluding that such techniques are capable of substantially flattening the system net demand curve.