Network Optimized Distributed Energy System (NODES)

Several US states have adopted Renewable Portfolio standards, leading to large-scale penetration of solar and wind energy. As a result, there is a growing reliance on ancillary services due to the high uncertainty in net load predictions. A major operational challenge for traditional generation units participating in such ancillary services is that they have significant inertia leading to increased wear and tear. Furthermore, they are generally too slow in tracking net load decrements if operating at their economic minimum. To overcome this problem, the utilities have identified the potential of groups of small capacity controllable demand technologies as critical ancillary services providers. However, most of the existing demand response schemes and state-of-the-art methods fail to enable controllable demand units in providing ancillary services. Two major challenges are: - Lack of provability: For acceptance as a reliable ancillary service, the aggregate of devices needs to provably adjust its consumption, even in the worst case when most devices have opted out. - Lack of price incentives: The technology further needs to be supported by the economic signals to be viable and be adopted in practice. The overall NODES program was motivated by the need to begin to overcome these challenges. In this report, we summarize the work done by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory (LL) project under this program.