An approach to demand side load curtailment for the future intelligent and smart power grid of Bangladesh

Abstract

Smart Grid, the future of the present electric grid has become one of the burning issues in energy and power industries and research. Being a developing country, Bangladesh has not yet taken any remarkable initiative regarding smart grid. Whereas, there is a strong possibility that a careful adaption of modern electric grid could significantly improve the present dissatisfaction among the consumers due to interrupted supply of electricity. Load shedding is the traditional approach of balancing supply and demand through scheduled power cut off. But in Bangladesh, customizing the load shedding through smart power grid, user satisfaction could be greatly improved. In this paper, an approach to smart grid and demand side load curtailment (DSLC) is proposed to reduce peak load for customizing load shedding and thus optimizing consumer satisfaction. Here, demand side load curtailment will be a key component of future smart grid that can help reduce peak load, reshape the load profile and adapt the increasing demand to generated power with the massive deployment of smart meters. DSLC empowers the load curtailment rather than full cutting off the power line. The proposed technique categorizes the consumers into three categories namely High, medium and low consumption users based on their consumption history and load profile. Moreover, the home appliances of the consumers of different categories also divided into three more categories namely high load, medium load and low load. Smart meter that every consumer owns is responsible for communicating with the different appliances connected and clustering them into appropriate category based on prior load threshold information provided. This paper describes a way to reduce the pick load selecting the victim consumer list and curtailing load in real time environment providing the consumer a minimum support rather than complete power cut off and thus optimizing the user satisfaction. To observe the various aspects of the model an experiment has been demonstrated in the paper.