Refrigeration Control Algorithm for Managing Supermarket’s Overall Peak Power Demand

Abstract

Demand-side management is an integral part of smart grids, which stabilizes and optimizes the power supply grid. For the consumer side, the demand management represents a way to reduce the energy costs. In this brief, a controllability of refrigeration system’s power demand is validated in order to manage the supermarket’s overall peak power demand. The applied control approach performs short-term adjustments of the refrigeration power demand, while taking into account the temperature limitations of air and stored items. Separate temperature constraints increase the demand shifting capabilities, and an additional dynamic reference adjustment approach provides a mean to significantly increase the control performance needed for overall peak demand minimization. Simulation model of the commercial refrigeration system and real overall power demand measurements are used as a use case. The results show high usability and applicability of the proposed approach to manage even the worst case overall peak power demands solely with refrigeration power demand adjustments.