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As summer arrives, people turn air conditioners in most of the United States, but if you are like me, you always feel a little guilty about it. Past generations managed without air conditioning – Do I really need this? And how bad is it to use all this electricity to cool in a world of warming?
If I leave my air conditioner, I’m too hot. But if everyone lights their air conditioner at the same time, the request for PIC electricity, which can force electrical network operators to activate part of the most expensive and dirty electric power plants. Sometimes these tips can require too much grid and lead to Bathroom or breakdown.
Research I Recently published with a team of researchers, makes me feel a little better, however. We found that it is possible to Coordinate the operation of a large number of home air conditioning unitsBalancing supply and demand on the electricity network – and without making people support high temperatures inside their house.
Studies in this sense, using Air conditioners remote control To support the grid, have spent for many years Theoretical possibilities explored like that. However, few approaches have been demonstrated in practice and never such a great value application and on this scale. The system that we have developed not only demonstrated the ability to balance the grid at second time scales, but has also proven that it was possible to do so without affecting the comfort of residents.
The advantages include the increase in the reliability of the electrical network, which facilitates the network to accept more renewable energy. Our objective is to transform the air conditioners of a challenge for the electrical network into an asset, supporting a gap of the fossil fuels towards cleaner energy.
Adjustable equipment
My research focuses on batteries, solar panels and electrical equipment – such as electric vehicles, water heater, air conditioners and heat pumps – which can adapt has consume different amounts of energy at different times.
Originally, the United States The electric grid was built Transport electricity from large power plants to houses and businesses in customers. And originally, power plants were large centralized operations that burned coal or natural gas, or energy harvested in nuclear reactions. These factories were generally always available and could adjust the amount of power they generated in response to customer demand, so the network would be balanced between power from producers and used by consumers.
But the grid has changed. There is More renewable energy sourcesFrom what power is not always available – like solar panels at night or wind turbines on calm days. And there are the devices and equipment that I study. These more recent options, called “distributed energy resources”, generate or store energy near where consumers need it – or adjust the amount of energy they use in real time.
However, one aspect of the grid has not changed: there is not much storage integrated into the system. So each time you turn on a light, for a moment, there is not enough electricity to provide everything that wants it at the time: the network needs an energy producer to generate a little more power. And when you turn off a light, there is a little too much: an energy producer must be absent.
The way in which power plants know which power adjustments in real time are necessary is to closely monitor the frequency of the network. The objective is to provide electricity at a constant frequency – 60 Hertz – at any time. If more power is necessary that what is produced, the frequency fall and a power station increases the output. If there is too much power produced, the frequency increases and a power plant slows down production a little. These actions, a process called “frequency regulation”, occur in seconds to maintain the balanced grid.
This outlet flexibility, mainly power plants, is essential to keep the lights on for everyone.
Find new options
I am interested in the way distributed energy resources can improve the flexibility of the network. They can release more energy, or consume less, to respond to the evolution of supply or demand, and help balance the network, ensuring that the frequency remains close to 60 Hertz.
Some people fear that this will be invasive, giving Someone outside you The possibility of controlling your battery or air conditioner. Therefore, we wanted to see if we could help balance the network with frequency regulation using home air conditioning units rather than power plants – without affecting the way residents use their devices or how comfortable they are.
From 2019 to 2023, my group of the University of Michigan tried this approach, in collaboration with researchers from Pecan Street Inc., Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of California in Berkeley, with funding from the US American Energy Department Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
We have recruited 100 owners in Austin, Texas, to take a real world test of our system. All houses had forced air cooling systems at home, which we connected to control cards and personalized sensors that the owners allowed us to install in their homes. This equipment allowed us to send instructions to air conditioning units according to the frequency of the grid.
Before explaining how the system worked, I must first explain how the thermostats work. When people define thermostats, they choose a temperature and the thermostat changes the air conditioning compressor on and deactivate to keep the air temperature in a small beach around this point of instructions. If the temperature is set to 68 degrees, the thermostat lights the CA when the temperature is, for example, and turns off when it is cooled, for example, 66.
Every second, our system has slightly changed the schedule of air conditioning compressor switching for some of the 100 air conditioners, which changes the overall energy consumption of the units. In this way, our small group of home air conditioners reacted to the change network as a power plant would do – using more or less energy to balance the network and maintain the frequency nearly 60 Hertz.
In addition, our system was designed to maintain the temperatures of the house in the same small temperature range around the instruction point.
Test the approach
We have executed our system in four tests, each lasts an hour. We found two encouraging results.
First, the air conditioners were able to Provide frequency regulation At least as precisely as a traditional power plant. Therefore, we have shown that air conditioners could play an important role in increasing the flexibility of the grid. But perhaps even more important – at least in terms of encouraging people to participate in these types of systems – we found that we could do it without affecting people’s comfort at home.
We found that the temperatures of the house did not deviate more than 1.6 fahrenheit from their point of instructions. The owners were allowed to overcome the orders if they became uncomfortable, but most did not do so. For most tests, we have received zero replacement requests. In the worst case, we received requests to replace two of the 100 houses in our test.
In practice, this type of technology could be added to Internet connected thermostats available commercially. In exchange for credits on their energy bills, users could choose to join a service managed by the thermostat company, their public service provider or another third party.
Then, people could turn on the air conditioning in the summer heat without this point of guilt, knowing that they helped the grid more reliable and more capable of accommodating renewable energy sources – without sacrificing their own comfort in the process.
Johanna MathieuAssociate professor of electrical and computer engineering, Michigan University. This article is republished from The conversation Under a creative communs license. Read it original article.
