Want to Reduce Energy Consumption, Whom should we call?

Priyanka Mary Mammen, Hareesh Kumar, Krithi Ramamritham, Haroon Rashid

Abstract: Power shortage is a serious issue in developing nations. During periods of high demand, utilities need to motivate the consumers to curtail their consumption for maintaining grid stability and avoiding blackouts or brownouts. Identification of suitable candidates is essential for such events, as the budget set aside by utilities for Demand Response (DR) events for providing incentives to the consumers should not exceed the added production cost due to peaks. Similarly, from the consumers' point of view, participation comes with the compromise to their convenience. Hence, the selection criteria should be such that it minimizes the peaking cost to the utility without affecting consumer comfort. In this paper, we present SmarDeR, a smart DR consumer selection strategy which considers several factors and consolidates them into a single function which can work in different modes to strategically choose the candidates for the DR event based on the goals specified by the utility. We evaluate different policies and metrics for approaching the right consumers for participating in the DR events. Thereby, we can maintain a fair distribution of requests among the most relevant and reliable users. Experiments with smart-meter data from apartments in our campus demonstrates the effectiveness of our SmarDeR approach.