Smart Grid Stabilization Approaches

The implementation of smart-grid functionality facilitates both real-time monitoring of consumption and real-time pricing (RTP). Its potential lies mainly in reducing the need for more base load power plants, integrating renewables, and reducing the cost of operation for utilities by smoothing out demand and minimizing power wastage. The integration of renewable sources makes the power supply stochastic and real time pricing makes demand stochastic. We can thus face significant supply-demand imbalances. We show it is possible, at least in theory, to stabilize both the demand and scales of the grid through making RTP attractive, and through exploiting natural phenomena and human habits. Our method can accomplish these goals without calling for costly grid storage. We show how even simple pricing contract can ease consumer acceptance of RTP, something the utilities have not been able to sell to their costumers. We exploit regularities in consumer habits to derive the statistics of power usage over different time scales and show supply and demand statistics can be matched over these different time scales. Thus, we show that solar power production can be matched with the power consumption of air-conditioning, wind power supply can be matched with consumption from weekly consumer needs such as laundry or once per day needs such as dishwashers and water heaters. We conclude with a discission of sensing and control requirements to achieve these goals.