Coordination of DERs for Grid Reliability via Day-ahead Demand-Supply Power Bounds

A previous study has shown that coordinating DERs to protect the distribution grid can significantly reduce the infrastructure upgrades needed to address future increases in DER and electrification penetrations. Implementing such coordination in the real world, however, is challenging due the temporal and spatial uncertainties about the loads and renewable generation, smart meter and network delays, incomplete information about the grid, different consumer objectives and privacy constraints, and scalability of the coordination scheme. This paper describes a day-ahead 2-layer DER coordination scheme that addresses these challenges. A global controller uses historical load data to compute day-ahead hourly demand upper and lower bounds for each consumer node. It then solves a largest volume axis-aligned box optimization problem to determine corresponding supply power bounds which if followed, ensures grid reliability. A local controller at each consumer node then determines the DER power injections which satisfy the consumer's objectives while obeying its supply bounds. Simulation results demonstrate, for example, that this scheme can capture 62% of the reduction in transformer violations achievable by the perfect-foresight centralized controller used in the aforementioned previous study.