Partners
Promotor / Supervisor
Prof. dr. ir. Geert Deconinck
Samenvatting van het onderzoek / Summary of Research
Large-scale deployment of renewable energy sources and increasing opportunities for electrification of transport and heating are leading to increasingly complex supply and demand power flows, pressurising the electricity grids, markets and actors that are currently in use.
In recent years demand response has received renewed research attention due to advances in control theory and the abundance of affordable computational and communication resources. This dissertation is focussed on the development of efficient, practical, and reliable control approaches for large clusters of residential appliances. The resulting virtual power plant can be used to offer valuable services to utilities and system operators, transforming end-users into green, active and profitable stakeholders of the energy transition. Throughout this work, the economic and technical feasibility of the approaches was strongly kept in mind, and supported by practical, real-world deployments.
The first part of this work uses a heterogeneous mix of device classes as used in the LINEAR project, a large-scale research and demonstration project using flexible appliances of 240 Belgian families. The second part is dedicated to thermostatically controlled loads, which offer the largest combined residential power and energy storage capacity. A hard-wired field trial has been conducted using 25 student refrigerators in dorm rooms on the UC Berkeley campus.
Volledige tekst van het doctoraat / full text
Examencommissie / Board of examiners
Prof. dr. ir. Geert Deconinck (promotor)
Prof. dr. ir. Dirk Vandermeulen (voorzitter/chairman)
Prof. dr. ir. Patrick Wambacq (secretaris/secretary)
Prof. dr. ir. Ronnie Belmans
Dr.Ir. Bert Claessens , Centrica Business Solutions Belgium NV
Prof. dr. Lars Nordström , KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Prof. dr. Duncan Callaway , University of California