Reference-Tracking Control Policies for Packetized Coordination of Heterogeneous DER Populations

This manuscript presents design and analysis of a set of reference-tracking control policies for large-scale coordination of distributed energy resources (DERs) and quantifies tracking errors that arise due to heterogeneity in the power ratings for a fleet of DERs. In particular, the relay-based, reference-tracking control strategy that underpins much of packetized energy management (PEM) is augmented to uniquely leverage PEM’s energy packet request mechanism to optimize the number of accepted requests and to explicitly consider the quality of service (QoS). In addition, tracking errors from modeling a heterogeneous fleet of packetized DERs with a group of homogeneous macromodels are analytically derived for relevant PEM information scenarios. Finally, simulation-based analysis validates the results and shows that PEM is suitable for providing load balancing and ramping services for the grid.