Model-based control on populations of air conditioners: shaping aggregated power for demand side management

PERFUMO, CRISTIAN; ERNESTO KOFMAN; JULIO BRASLAVSKY,; JOHN WARD

Melbourne

Conferencia; 2011 Australian Control Conference; 2011

Institution of Engineers Australia and IEEE Control Systems Society

A population of thermostatically controlled de-vices such as air conditioners can be managed as a whole toreduce their load during a critical period or to participatein the electricity market. We present a model based onfirst principles for the power response of a population ofair conditioners controlled by a common temperature setpoint change. We then develop a model-based controllerfor the aggregated power of the population. Our controllerrequires fine temperature set point resolution. For coarseresolution, as in ACs installed nowadays, we propose todivide the population into logical clusters and send differentcoarse-resolution signals to each cluster. Clustering achievesthe same performance as using one global, high resolution,signal.