Distributed Self-Triggered Control of Thermostatically Controlled Loads for Providing Ancillary Services

Rapidly growing renewable energies lead to large power fluctuations in power supply, which challenges the secure and stable operation of power systems. In recent years, researchers pay much attention to the regulation of demand-side flexible resources in order to overcome the challenges brought by renewable energies. To provide adequate regulation capacity required by the power system operator, how to aggregate and manage massive demand-side flexible resources is a challenging research problem. This paper investigates on a novel distributed control framework to manage thermostatically controlled loads for providing ancillary services. Compared with existing control methods in literature, the proposed control framework has advantages in terms of much lower computation and communication burden for thermostatically controlled loads. The advantages of the proposed control framework is verified by numerical studies.