Simulation study of transactive control strategies for residential HVAC systems

Demand response (DR) is a popular alternative to the control of generation assets in balancing energy production and consumption in the electric grid. The end-use electrical demand can be adjusted based on real-time electricity prices, known as price-based DR. A means to enable automatic price-based DR is to implement a transactive controller, in which energy consuming devices respond to the market price signal and reduce their power consumption. In this paper, two transactive control strategies, i.e., with and without pre-cooling, are simulated to analyze their effectiveness in controlling residential HVAC systems. Their ability to perform peak demand reduction and save money on electricity bills is evaluated for one home and a group of 100 homes. The study is carried out using the GridLAB-D simulation tool.