A Novel Scheduling Strategy for Controllable Loads With Power-Efficiency Characteristics

This paper proposes a novel scheduling strategy to dispatch controllable loads with nonlinear power-efficiency characteristics. Due to these characteristics, the controllable loads, such as desalination devices, suffer from efficiency loss when participating in day-ahead and real-time power regulations. The existing two-stage scheduling algorithms ignore the real-time efficiency loss at the day-ahead stage. In order to consider the real-time efficiency loss, a complex single-stage scheduling model with numerous optimization variables is required. This will greatly increase the computation burden to the optimization algorithm. To deal with this issue, a novel efficiency threshold-based control method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method only has three efficiency thresholds, thus the number of optimization variables is significantly reduced. Based on this method, a novel energy scheduling framework is designed for the controllable loads with power-efficiency characteristics. Numerical simulations indicate that the proposed approach can utilize the power regulation flexibility of controllable loads in both day-ahead and real-time stages to reduce the operation cost.