Enhancing Resilience During Islanding Events Through Price-Responsive Loads

With an increasing number of smart electrical appliances in our homes today, it is increasingly viable to form responsive microgrids (RMGs) that are stable and contribute to resilience in case of unintentional islanding. When an islanding event occurs, a region of the grid with net energy import that also depends on low-inertia variable sources could become unstable, potentially resulting in a blackout. In the past, demand response (DR) programs and peak load shifting have been used to manage microgrids on the demand side. However, these techniques are system specific. This paper proposes a scalable model, implemented in Julia language, that leverages price-sensitive loads to relieve capacity during tight operating conditions, and therefore decrease the amount of load to be shed in the event of islanding. Experiments in a modified IEEE RTS-96 benchmarking network indicate that less energy is shed using flexible loads than inflexible loads, contributing to the overall resilience of the system.