A control strategy for air-conditioning loads participating in frequency regulation based on model predictive control

Air-Conditioning Loads (ACLs) can participate in real time active power control and thus support power system Frequency Regulation (FR). However, the constraints by the thermal dynamics limits the frequency control performance. To fill this gap, a Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based control strategy is proposed in this paper to deal with thermodynamical restriction. By predicting the future state of the system and updates the control coefficients of ACLs control system accordingly, out of limit of the ACLs' control capacity can be avoided, and the frequency control performance can be therefore improved. Simulation results indicate that compared to traditional methods, the proposed method can more effectively avoid the out of limit of ACLs' capacity, reducing the maximum frequency deviation of the system by approximately 34%.