Load Control at Users' Demand Side in Cyber‐Physical System for Balancing Variable Renewable Generation

For the coordination of supply and demand under high penetration of variable renewable generation, a control strategy of aggregated electric water heater (EWH) loads is proposed in this paper to balance variable renewable generation from the perspective of a cyber‐physical system, considering that the internet technology and the next‐generation information technology are deeply integrated with the power system. This strategy adopts the thermostat setpoint control mode to control the ON/OFF state of a single EWH. A response status model is built to perceive the current responsive event type and the current responsive priority of the EWH. A closed‐loop control of aggregated EWHs for state awareness, real‐time analysis, scientific decision making, and precise execution is constructed between the cyber space and the physical space, based on automatic data flow. And the state awareness logic, the real‐time analysis logic, the scientific decision‐making logic, and the precise execution logic of the closed‐loop control are designed to realize the self‐organization, self‐decision, and self‐optimization of aggregated EWHs for balancing variable renewable generation. By comparing different cases, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed control strategy. © 2018 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.