Distributed Control of Aggregated Smart Buildings for Frequency Regulation.

Increased penetration level of renewable energy and its intermittency make the power grid more prone to frequency fluctuation. Demand response of the aggregated smart buildings can provide ancillary secondary frequency regulation. Distributed control methods for the aggregated buildings are attractive due to plug-and-play scalability, high reliability, no single point of failure, and lower communication requirements, compared to the conventional centralized control. This paper identifies three major control objectives for this distributed control problem including balancing the state-of-energy of the buildings, tracking frequency regulation signal, and eliminating circulating power. The control problem is challenging as these control objectives need to be achieved simultaneously in a distributed fashion. This paper proposes a new distributed control method to achieve the three objectives at the same time. The plug-and-play scalability and the robustness to communication-link failure of the proposed control are verified through simulations. Moreover, using data from California Independent System Operator (CAISO), a three-area power system is simulated with heterogeneous building parameters to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method, which achieves the three control objectives and reduces the frequency deviation by more than 30% with the aggregated buildings.