Distributed demand side management using electric boilers

Demand side management is a promising approach towards the integration of renewable energy sources in the electric grid, which does not require massive infrastructural investments. In this paper, we report the analysis of the performance of a demand side management algorithm for the control of electric boilers, developed within the context of the GridSense project. GridSense is a multi-objective energy management system that aims at decreasing both the end user energy costs and the congestions on the local feeder. The latter objective is minimized exploiting the existent correlation between the voltage measured at the connection point to the grid and the power flow measured at the low voltage transformer. The algorithm behavior has been firstly investigated by means of simulation, using typical water consumption profiles and a simplified thermodynamic model of the electric boiler. The simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively shift the boiler’s electric consumption based on voltage and price profiles. In the second phase, we analyzed the results from a pilot project, in which the GridSense units were controlling the boilers of four households, located in the same low voltage grid.