The increasing use of renewable energy sources with variable output, such as solar photovoltaic and wind power generation, calls for Smart Grids that effectively manage flexible loads and energy storage. The ability to forecast consumption at different locations in distribution systems will be a key capability of Smart Grids. The goal of this paper is to benchmark state-of-the-art methods for forecasting electricity demand on the household level across different granularities and time scales in an explorative way, thereby revealing potential shortcomings and find promising directions for future research in this area. We apply a number of forecasting methods including ARIMA, neural networks, and exponential smoothening using several strategies for training data selection, in particular day type and sliding window based strategies. We consider forecasting horizons ranging between 15 minutes and 24 hours. Our evaluation is based on two data sets containing the power usage of individual appliances at second time granularity collected over the course of several months. The results indicate that forecasting accuracy varies significantly depending on the choice of forecasting methods strategy and the parameter configuration. Measured by the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), the considered state-of-the-art forecasting methods rarely beat corresponding persistence forecasts. Overall, we observed MAPEs in the range between 5 and >100 . The average MAPE for the first data set was 30 , while it was 85 for the other data set. These results show big room for improvement. Based on the identified trends and experiences from our experiments, we contribute a detailed discussion of promising future research.
The approaches for demand side management focus on different levels of the power system. On the grid operator level, studies focus for example on the minimization of power flow fluctuations @cite_17 or the integration of renewable energy @cite_13 . The distribution grid operator uses consumption forecasts to balance grids with a high penetration of decentralized generation of renewable energy (e.g., @cite_30 , @cite_14 ). Other studies look at the level of groups of consumers with a focus on game theoretic frameworks @cite_27 or virtual price signals @cite_6 . Most work on demand response, however, focuses on the level of end consumers. Recent research has studied the use of variable price signals for individual customers. These dynamic tariffs penalize consumption during certain periods of time with increased electricity prices, so that customers can respond by adjusting their consumption (e.g., @cite_8 , @cite_7 ). However, @cite_1 points out that demand side management with variable price signals can cause instabilities through load synchronization. To avoid uncontrolled behavior, accurate consumption forecasts can help utilities to select customers that are most suitable for a demand response program.
@cite_30 @cite_14 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_27 @cite_13 @cite_17
2140988255 2065886006 1970705460 1934866980 2192253623 2068060907 2077839994 2153393240
The increased uncertainty of the electric grid due to the penetration of renewable energy sources and deregulation of the electric market is aimed to be alleviated by demand response (DR) in the future smart grid. The demand-side resources can be incentivized to alter their consumption patterns by varying their electricity price over time. A major residential energy demand contribution is from electric heating, which, when combined with smart energy storage using water heaters, could be utilized to defer consumption to more inexpensive periods without affecting the customer's thermal quality of service. The objective is to optimize the consumer electricity price of electric storage space heating customers, in order to maximize the profit of the retailer. This approach of varying the customer electricity prices leads to a game-theoretic scenario, where the procurement and consumption profiles of the retailer and consumer agents are based on the set electricity price. The optimization of the consumer electricity price is shown to offer lesser expense for the retailer. In addition, hourly load-following can be improved by offering further discounts for the consumers. Most of the existing demand-side management programs focus primarily on the interactions between a utility company and its customers users. In this paper, we present an autonomous and distributed demand-side energy management system among users that takes advantage of a two-way digital communication infrastructure which is envisioned in the future smart grid. We use game theory and formulate an energy consumption scheduling game, where the players are the users and their strategies are the daily schedules of their household appliances and loads. It is assumed that the utility company can adopt adequate pricing tariffs that differentiate the energy usage in time and level. We show that for a common scenario, with a single utility company serving multiple customers, the global optimal performance in terms of minimizing the energy costs is achieved at the Nash equilibrium of the formulated energy consumption scheduling game. The proposed distributed demand-side energy management strategy requires each user to simply apply its best response strategy to the current total load and tariffs in the power distribution system. The users can maintain privacy and do not need to reveal the details on their energy consumption schedules to other users. We also show that users will have the incentives to participate in the energy consumption scheduling game and subscribing to such services. Simulation results confirm that the proposed approach can reduce the peak-to-average ratio of the total energy demand, the total energy costs, as well as each user's individual daily electricity charges. The integration of renewable energy systems (RESs) in smart grids (SGs) is a challenging task, mainly due to the intermittent and unpredictable nature of the sources, typically wind or sun. Another issue concerns the way to support the consumers' participation in the electricity market aiming at minimizing the costs of the global energy consumption. This paper proposes an energy management system (EMS) aiming at optimizing the SG's operation. The EMS behaves as a sort of aggregator of distributed energy resources allowing the SG to participate in the open market. By integrating demand side management (DSM) and active management schemes (AMS), it allows a better exploitation of renewable energy sources and a reduction of the customers' energy consumption costs with both economic and environmental benefits. It can also improve the grid resilience and flexibility through the active participation of distribution system operators (DSOs) and electricity supply demand that, according to their preferences and costs, respond to real-time price signals using market processes. The efficiency of the proposed EMS is verified on a 23-bus 11-kV distribution network. Demand side management will be a key component of future smart grid that can help reduce peak load and adapt elastic demand to fluctuating generations. In this paper, we consider households that operate different appliances including PHEVs and batteries and propose a demand response approach based on utility maximization. Each appliance provides a certain benefit depending on the pattern or volume of power it consumes. Each household wishes to optimally schedule its power consumption so as to maximize its individual net benefit subject to various consumption and power flow constraints. We show that there exist time-varying prices that can align individual optimality with social optimality, i.e., under such prices, when the households selfishly optimize their own benefits, they automatically also maximize the social welfare. The utility company can thus use dynamic pricing to coordinate demand responses to the benefit of the overall system. We propose a distributed algorithm for the utility company and the customers to jointly compute this optimal prices and demand schedules. Finally, we present simulation results that illustrate several interesting properties of the proposed scheme.