A Distributed Control Scheme of Thermostatically Controlled Loads for the Building-Microgrid Community

In this paper, thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs), e.g., air conditioners, are utilized to mitigate the photovoltaic and load variations in a building-microgrid community, so that the whole community can provide ancillary services, e.g., fulfilling the power dispatch order from the main grid. First, a distributed control scheme with a two-layer hierarchical communication graph is proposed. The control gains are selected based on a linear quadratic regulator approach to achieve optimal control performance. Then, an initial value updating method is developed so that the dispatch order and local regulation signals are converted into the initial conditions for distributed control. With the proposed control scheme, the building-microgrid community can provide ancillary services while fairly sharing power and customers' comfort requirement among all participated TCLs. The effectiveness of this control scheme is validated on a building-microgrid community with a variety of test cases.