Impact of Scheduling Flexibility on Demand Profile Flatness and User Inconvenience in Residential Smart Grid System

The objective of this paper is to study the impact of scheduling flexibility on both demand profile flatness and user inconvenience in residential smart grid systems. Temporal variations in energy consumption by end users result in peaks and troughs in the aggregated demand profile. In a residential smart grid, some of these peaks and troughs can be eliminated through appropriate load balancing algorithms. However, load balancing requires user participation by allowing the grid to re-schedule some of their loads. In general, more scheduling flexibility can result in more demand profile flatness, however the resulting inconvenience to users would also increase. In this paper, our objective is to help the grid determine an appropriate amount of scheduling flexibility that it should demand from users, based on which, proper incentives can be designed. We consider three different types of scheduling flexibility (delay, advance scheduling and flexible re-scheduling) in flexible loads and develop both optimal and sub-optimal scheduling algorithms. We discuss their implementation in centralized and distributed manners. We also identify the existence of a saturation point. Beyond this saturation point, any increase in scheduling flexibility does not significantly affect the flatness of the demand profile while user inconvenience continues to increase. Moreover, full participation of all the households is not required since increasing user participation only marginally increases demand profile flatness. Energies 2013, 6 6609