Decentralized elastic electricity demand scheduling

Abstract

The adoption of intermittent renewables in the electricity grid will increasingly require loads to track available generation. This paper proposes several algorithms to schedule flexible-power loads that arrive unpredictably to a grid-connected microgrid. These are based on standard schedulers such as Shortest Remaining Processing Time (SRPT), adapted to the fact that appliances have maximum power ratings. A simple decentralized scheduler is applied to ensure that the aggregate load does not exceed the generation, and a gain control mechanism is proposed to stabilize the system. The proposed scheduler has two sources of sub-optimality: determining the values of the control signals, and their..