PACEM: Cooperative Control for Citywide Energy Management

Proto/Amorphous Cooperative Energy Management (PACEM) controls energy demand across an entire metropolitan area by coordinating the behavior of individual electrical appliances. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the feasibility of PACEM by showing smooth demand shaping and additive scaling using cheap, decentralized communication hardware, both in simulation and on a test system of 50-100 devices. PACEM’s fine-grained control, taking each customer’s preferences and needs into account, rests on a foundation of novel algorithms, system designs, and compilation technologies coming from our previous work in spatial computing. This foundation allows us to create distributed programs that run robustly even on a rapidly changing population of millions of devices. This new technology will allow PACEM to be deployed incrementally without any changes to the existing power grid, with positive incentives for both utility companies and customers to participate. PACEM has the potential to smooth out peak consumption, decrease the frequency of power failures and brown-outs, and increase participation in conservation efforts, yet still create virtually no inconvenience for any customer. 1 Project Description Imagine this: it is a hot summer day and you are sitting at home when your phone rings: “Power company calling. Energy consumption is high right now: would you mind turning off your air conditioner?” You reply, “What if instead I raise the temperature a few degrees, turn off some lights, and read a book rather than watching TV?” “We really need less ACs. But if you do that and you and your neighbor take turns with AC, it’s OK.” “Sure, I know she’ll cooperate. I’ll turn mine off this hour, and she’ll turn hers of the next.” “Thanks! I’ll let you know when you can run it freely again, and we’ll cut your next bill a little.” A person’s energy needs are often fairly flexible: the temperature could change a few degrees, the laundry get done later, and that light be turned off. If customers and utilities were constantly negotiating with one another, they could use this flexibility to shape energy demands, smoothing peak consumption and making failures and brown-outs less likely. People will not do this. You don’t want to sit and wait for calls from your utility, and they don’t want to handle millions of negotiations. Most people interact with their utility once a month through their bill, and almost never with their neighbors. But what if your appliances knew your preferences and negotiated for you? What if they were also making deals with your neighbors (“I’ll run my AC this hour, you run yours the next”) and people in distant parts of the city (“I’ll do my laundry later so that the hospital can keep its AC running on full.”)? This is the vision for Proto/Amorphous Cooperative Energy Management (PACEM). Building on our Proto language for spatial computing, we propose to prototype a distributed energy management system in which millions of appliances across a metropolitan area cooperatively shape energy demand on a time scale of minute to hours in response to requests from utilities, yet still take the preferences and needs of every individual customer into account. Advantages of PACEM The powerful advantages of our approach make it likely that PACEM can be widely deployed within five years: • Painless for customers: Customers express flexibility during installation, in exchange for a discount. Once installed, it is largely invisible. • High-speed shaping of energy demand: Utilities control customer behavior to smooth out peaks in demand and reduce the likelihood of power failures and brown-outs.