Funding Year: 2018-2019

This GCRT will generate initial results towards development of systematic methods for enabling the next-generation of electricity demand response programs, aimed at increasing free-market mechanisms in the end-user realm of the electricity grid. They will investigate new pricing techniques for retail electricity vendors—known as aggregators—that make a profit by representing aggregated electric loads on the end-user side and moving them away from the time of peak demand in the electricity grid. The uniqueness of their work is in minimizing the impact on the customer (i.e., loss of comfort) while maximizing the profit of the aggregator. The game-changing aspect of their approach is to estimate the coincident peak hour in the system (i.e., 1 hour in a month) and engage demand response through incentives, rather than impose a daily requirement on the end-user.

Principal Investigators:

• Sid Suryanarayanan, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Edwin Chong, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mathematics
• Jesse Burkhardt, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics