Demand response of large-scale residential load to concentrated variable renewable energy

Abstract

Large-scale concentrated Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) sources pose a challenge to the balance and security of electricity systems. Studies have shown that the demand side may offer a greater responsiveness based on the shiftability of loads. However, there is currently no known literature on the demand response (DR) of large-scale shiftable loads in the residential sector. Firstly, there is no sufficiently large database of residential appliance-level load. Secondly, scheduling a large number of small residential shiftable loads simultaneously is a major challenge. Ultimately, the DR of large-scale residential buildings encounters the challenge of ensuring sufficient backup shiftable load to effectively cope with real-time VRE fluctuations during the response period. To address these issues, this paper proposes an appliance-level load data generation method based on diffusion neural networks. Meanwhile, a clustering method based on Generalized End to End (GE2E) loss neural networks is proposed to solve the complexity obstacles in simultaneous load swarm scheduling. Thirdly, a two-stage scheduling approach is proposed to address the challenges in the large-scale DR period through constructing day-ahead and real-time response models. The simulation results show that large-scale residential shiftable loads have a strong response capability to VRE fluctuations, and their response cost is lower than the conventional fuel-fired-power-plant-based-response within a certain user preference cost range. In practice, the clustering and scheduling methods proposed in this paper can be applied after the non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) method is deployed to decompose the load data.