Distributing power limits: Mitigating blackout through brownout

Abstract

A rapid rise in power consumption, by both commercial and residential buildings, as compared to power generation is being observed in the present times. Utilities, mostly in developing nations, adopt a naive approach of reducing the demand by rolling blackouts. However, this approach leads to user inconvenience. Under these circumstances, we address this problem by implementing an effective and systematic brownout mechanism. For a power usage cap (threshold) specified by the utility in a neighbourhood, we have developed algorithms which distribute these thresholds to individual consumers in neighbourhood. The two primary factors considered while distributing thresholds are minimizing the violation of thresholds across consumers and a heuristic for fairness in distribution. The algorithms developed in this paper are not computation intensive and require only the consumption profile of each consumer. Hence, they could be easily deployed across utilities in an electric grid. A detailed performance of these algorithms is evaluated on a real-world dataset. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed approach by ensuring minimum violations across the houses.