A centralized demand response control strategy for domestic electric water heater group based on appliance cloud platform

Abstract

Motivated by the potential ability of the domestic electric water heater (EWH) in demand response (DR), this paper proposes a centralized DR control strategy to dispatch the EWH loads considering a domestic EWH group based on the appliance cloud platform. The objective is to solve the problem of water heater load control when the appliance cloud platform participates in DR of load curtailment. To solve the problem, first, a DR system model of the appliance cloud platform is presented. Second, a model of single EWH thermal dynamics in static mode of operation is built based on energy flow analysis. Third, based on the system model and the model of EWH thermal dynamics, a DR control strategy in the timescale of minutes is proposed to implement DR control of an EWH load group in a centralized way by the appliance cloud platform. Finally, simulation results confirm the viability and efficiency of the proposed control strategy.