Enabling the participation of emergency, network, and ancillary services demand response programs

Project Title:

Enabling the participation of emergency, network, and ancillary services demand response programs

Supervisors:

Dr. Rakibuzzaman Shah, Associate Professor Jerry Hu and Dr. Kazi Nazmul Hasan

Contact Person:

Dr. Rakibuzzaman Shah (m.shah@federation.edu.au)

Project Outline:

Electrical power grids are the largest man-made complex networks globally, where the continuous balancing of the generation and demand is critical for securing reliable system operation. With the increased penetration of renewable generation into the electricity grids, the control from the generation-side is decreasing. That’s why increased flexibility is required from the demand-side to facilitate secure, efficient, and economical operation – which is driving the renewed interest in demand response.

More than 65% of Australia’s electricity is consumed by commercial and industrial (C&I) customers. Therefore, the large C&I customers have higher potential to facilitate demand response operations and are able to commit and deliver a significant part of the network demand. Subsequently, they incur a large percentage of their operating cost as electricity bills. As the price of electricity is varying over time, the non-optimal scheduling and operation of the load may increase the energy bills and emission footprint for the C&I customers. Also, the rising electricity costs tend to increase the operational cost of the C&I customers. The implementation of the demand response program, generally with the C&I customers, will face the following challenge:

Optimal participation in the available and forthcoming DR programs: To ensure high system reliability and operational flexibility, large C&I customers have onsite generation and storage devices. By identifying the appropriate operational strategies, C&I sites equipped with these resources could participate in the DR programs - which are available to them, such as wholesale, emergency, network and ancillary services.