As summer comes, people turn on to the air conditioning in most of the United States, but if you are like me, you always feel a little guilty for it. Air -conditioned past generations managed: Do I really need it? And how bad it is to use all this electricity to cool -in a world of warming?
If I leave my air conditioner, it is too hot. But if everyone turns on their air conditioning at the same time, electricity demand peaks, which can force the operators of the mains to activate a few The most expensive and dirty electric plants. Sometimes these spikes can ask too much the network and lead to Browrouts or Blackouts.
Investigate I However, published recently with a team of scholars makes me feel a little better. We found that it is possible to do Coordinate the operation of a large number of domestic air conditioning unitsBalance the supply and demand on the mains and without making people support high temperatures inside the house.
Studies in this line, using Remote control of air conditioning to support the network for many years explored theoretical possibilities So. However, few approaches to practice have been shown and never for a high value application and this scale. The system we developed not only demonstrated the ability to balance the network within seconds, but also showed that it was possible to do so without affecting the comfort of residents.
The advantages include increasing the reliability of the electricity network, making it easier for the network to accept more renewable energy. Our goal is to turn air conditioners from a challenge for the electricity network into an asset, supporting a displacement of fossil fuels towards the cleaner energy.
Adjustable equipment
My research focuses on batteries, solar panels and electrical equipment, such as electric vehicles, water heaters, air conditioning and heat pumps, which can Adjust -Self self into Consume different amounts of energy at different times.
Originally the USA The power grid was built Transporting electricity from large currency plants to customers’ homes and businesses. And originally, electric power plants were large and centralized operations that burned coal or natural gas, or that they harvested energy from nuclear reactions. These plants were usually always available and could adjust the amount of power they generated in response to the client’s demand, so that the grid was balanced between the power that came from the producers and used by consumers.
But the network has changed. There are more renewable energy sourcesFrom which power is not always available, such as solar panels at night or wind turbines on calm days. And there are the devices and the teams it studies. These newer 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.
One aspect of the network has not changed, but: There is not much storage integrated into the system. So every time you start a light, there is not enough electricity for a moment to supply everything you want: the network needs an energy producer to generate a little more energy. And when you turn off a light, there is a little too much: an electric producer has to go down.
The way electric power plants know what power adjustments are in real time, supervising the frequency of the network closely. The goal is to provide electricity to a constant frequency – 60 hertz – at all times. If more power is needed than it occurs, the low frequency and a power plant increases production. If it occurs too much power, the frequency increases and a power plant slightly slows the production. These actions, a process called “frequency regulation”, occur in seconds to keep the network balanced.
This output flexibility, mainly from electric power plants, is key to keeping lights on for everyone.
Find new options
I am interested in how distributed energy resources can improve network flexibility. They can release more energy or consume less, to respond to the changing supply or demand and help balance the network, ensuring that the frequency remains about 60 Hertz.
There are those who fear that you can be invasive, giving Someone outside the house The possibility of controlling battery or air conditioning. Therefore, we wanted to see if we could help balance the network with frequency regulation through domestic air conditioning units instead of electric power plants, without affecting how residents use their appliances or how comfortable they are at home.
From 2019 to 2023, my group from the University of Michigan sought this approach, in collaboration with researchers from the Pecan Street Inc., Laboratory Nacional de los Alamos and the University of California, Berkeley, with funding from the United States Department of Energy Advanced Agency-Energy Research Projects.
We recruited 100 owners in Austin, Texas, to take a real world test of our system. All the houses had a whole air cooling systems of the whole house, which we connected to personalized control boards and sensors that the owners allowed us to install in their homes. This computer allows us to send instructions to the air conditioning units based on the frequency of the network.
Before explaining how the system worked, I must first explain the operation of thermostats. When people configure the thermostats, they choose a temperature and the thermostat changes the air conditioning compressor to maintain and deactivate the air temperature inside a small rank around this established point. If the temperature is established at 68 degrees, the thermostat is turned on when the temperature is, for example, 70, and disabled when it cools to, for example, 66.
Every few seconds, our system slightly changing the synchronization of the air conditioning compressor change for some of the 100 air conditioning conditioners, causing the aggregate energy consumption of units to change. In this way, our small group of domestic air conditioning reacted to the changes in the network as a power plant would be: using more or less energy to balance the network and keep the frequency about 60 Hertz.
In addition, our system was designed to maintain home temperatures within the same small temperature range around the established point.
Try the approach
We have directed our system in four tests, each with an hour. We found two encouraging results.
First, the air conditioning could do provide frequency regulation At least exactly as a traditional power plant. Therefore, we showed that air conditioners could play an important role in increasing network flexibility. But perhaps most important, at least in terms of people to participate in these types of systems, we found that we were able to do so without affecting the comfort of people in their homes.
We found that the temperatures of the household no more than 1.6 fahrenheit was diverted from its established point. The owners were authorized to cancel the controls if they were uncomfortable, but most did not. For most tests, we have received zero replacement applications. In the worst case, we received applications to replace two of the 100 houses in our test.
In practice, this type of technology could be added Thermostats connected to the Internet available commercially. In exchange for credits to their energy bills, users could choose to join a service led by the thermostat company, its utility supplier or some other third.
People could then turn on the air conditioning to the summer heat without guilt, knowing that it helped make the network more reliable and more capable of hosting renewable sources of energy, without sacrificing their own comfort in the process.
Johanna MathieuAssociate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Michigan. This article is published from The conversation Under a Creative Commons license. Read the Original item.
