Development and applications of a random variable model for cold load pickup

A deterministic model is developed for simulating steady state and transient response of thermostatically controlled electric space heating on a distribution feeder. Transient disturbances include cold load pickup on both sectionalized and nonsectionalized feeders and a step change in voltage on the feeder. Thermodynamic parameters and perturbations to these parameters caused by customer action are modeled as gaussian distributed random variables. Results from the step change in voltage indicate that system identification techniques could be applied in an effort to predict severity of cold load pickup on a feeder