Analytics and Transactive Control Design for the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project

Abstract

We have embarked on a comprehensive smart grid demonstration project in the Pacific Northwest involving 60,000 customers from 12 utilities across 5 states, covering the end-to-end electrical system from generation to consumption, built around a substantial infrastructure of deployed smart meters. The goal of this project is to demonstrate among other things how transactive control can be used to manage distributed generation and demand response. The current plan is to test a hierarchical but decentralized control system where each node of the power grid uses local signals of demand and price to match supply with demand at varying frequencies of up to every 5 minutes or less. In this paper we discuss different theoretical and practical aspects of transactive control, and identify the analytic methods that would need to be explored to operationalize such a design.