IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid 

About: IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid is an academic journal published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Computer science & Smart grid. It has an ISSN identifier of 1949-3053. Over the lifetime, 4768 publications have been published receiving 335952 citations. The journal is also known as: Smart grid & Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers transactions on smart grid.

Autonomous Demand-Side Management Based on Game-Theoretic Energy Consumption Scheduling for the Future Smart Grid

Abstract: 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.

Trends in Microgrid Control

Abstract: The increasing interest in integrating intermittent renewable energy sources into microgrids presents major challenges from the viewpoints of reliable operation and control. In this paper, the major issues and challenges in microgrid control are discussed, and a review of state-of-the-art control strategies and trends is presented; a general overview of the main control principles (e.g., droop control, model predictive control, multi-agent systems) is also included. The paper classifies microgrid control strategies into three levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary, where primary and secondary levels are associated with the operation of the microgrid itself, and tertiary level pertains to the coordinated operation of the microgrid and the host grid. Each control level is discussed in detail in view of the relevant existing technical literature.

Optimal Residential Load Control With Price Prediction in Real-Time Electricity Pricing Environments

Abstract: Real-time electricity pricing models can potentially lead to economic and environmental advantages compared to the current common flat rates. In particular, they can provide end users with the opportunity to reduce their electricity expenditures by responding to pricing that varies with different times of the day. However, recent studies have revealed that the lack of knowledge among users about how to respond to time-varying prices as well as the lack of effective building automation systems are two major barriers for fully utilizing the potential benefits of real-time pricing tariffs. We tackle these problems by proposing an optimal and automatic residential energy consumption scheduling framework which attempts to achieve a desired trade-off between minimizing the electricity payment and minimizing the waiting time for the operation of each appliance in household in presence of a real-time pricing tariff combined with inclining block rates. Our design requires minimum effort from the users and is based on simple linear programming computations. Moreover, we argue that any residential load control strategy in real-time electricity pricing environments requires price prediction capabilities. This is particularly true if the utility companies provide price information only one or two hours ahead of time. By applying a simple and efficient weighted average price prediction filter to the actual hourly-based price values used by the Illinois Power Company from January 2007 to December 2009, we obtain the optimal choices of the coefficients for each day of the week to be used by the price predictor filter. Simulation results show that the combination of the proposed energy consumption scheduling design and the price predictor filter leads to significant reduction not only in users' payments but also in the resulting peak-to-average ratio in load demand for various load scenarios. Therefore, the deployment of the proposed optimal energy consumption scheduling schemes is beneficial for both end users and utility companies.

Short-Term Residential Load Forecasting Based on LSTM Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract: As the power system is facing a transition toward a more intelligent, flexible, and interactive system with higher penetration of renewable energy generation, load forecasting, especially short-term load forecasting for individual electric customers plays an increasingly essential role in the future grid planning and operation. Other than aggregated residential load in a large scale, forecasting an electric load of a single energy user is fairly challenging due to the high volatility and uncertainty involved. In this paper, we propose a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network-based framework, which is the latest and one of the most popular techniques of deep learning, to tackle this tricky issue. The proposed framework is tested on a publicly available set of real residential smart meter data, of which the performance is comprehensively compared to various benchmarks including the state-of-the-arts in the field of load forecasting. As a result, the proposed LSTM approach outperforms the other listed rival algorithms in the task of short-term load forecasting for individual residential households.

Hierarchical Structure of Microgrids Control System

Abstract: Advanced control strategies are vital components for realization of microgrids. This paper reviews the status of hierarchical control strategies applied to microgrids and discusses the future trends. This hierarchical control structure consists of primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, and is a versatile tool in managing stationary and dynamic performance of microgrids while incorporating economical aspects. Various control approaches are compared and their respective advantages are highlighted. In addition, the coordination among different control hierarchies is discussed.