Intelligent Demand Response Scheme for Customer Side Load Management

Demand response (DR) provides means for utilities to reduce the power consumption and save energy. Plus, it maximizes utilizing the current capacity of the distribution system infrastructure, reducing or eliminating the need for building new lines and expanding the system. A typical DR program requires two parties to cooperate: the utility and the customers. In this paper a novel intelligent demand response module is designed and proposed to be implemented at the customer side. The primary target of this design is large industrial sized customers that often have several manufacturing/production lines consisting of mostly large electric motors. The proposed DR module design is based on the expert systems theory. Different modules are designed that take the market rates as well as the local load management policy of the customer into account in order to make a decision for reducing the load. The validity of the proposed algorithm is tested on the IEEE 34-bus distribution test feeder in the real-time RT-Lab environment.