Soft Control: A Novel Application of Internet of Things for Demand Side Management

Demand side management (DSM) is the modulation of consumers' energy demand to ameliorate the power network at the consumer side. In case of contingency which leads to frequency falling below a preset value, traditional methods like load shedding, which de-energize one or more feeders, are implemented to prevent sustained interruptions. This approach is neither efficient nor reliable because this may lead to loss of energy to critical infrastructure and loss of distributed energy sources (DERs) injection. Implementation of home automation and communication systems in distribution networks enables optimization of energy consumption during a power system contingency. Energy Controllers (EC) can achieve fine adjustment of consumers' power consumption which can be used to selectively de-energize certain consumers, instead of a whole region. In this paper, a real-time centralized under-voltage event-based DSM approach called Soft Control (SC) that modulates energy consumption of each consumers' load utilizing Internet of Things (IoT) is presented. This DSM technique can be utilized for both active and passive distribution networks and is formulated as a utilization maximization problem. The performance of the proposed DSM approach is evaluated using the IEEE 16 bus system. The ease of implementation and computational efficiency highlight potential aspects for practical implementation.