Loading Levelling By Control of Air Conditioner Operation.

The recent drastic increase in the number of air conditioners has caused sharp and narrow peaks in summer seasons due to the inherent temperature-sensitive characteristics. The authors proposed a method to reduce the peak power demand by controlling air conditioner operations, and verify its effectiveness on clipping peak demand. However, former study has shortcomings in that no qualitative treatment of room temperature or comfort was attempted, and it did not provide a way of assessing peak demand clipping in a power system as a whole. In this paper, the authors propose a new control method that can be deal with the maintaining of comfort and the reduction in power demand. Although air conditioners are used for ‘comfort’, this contradicts the reduction of power consumption and furthermore the concept of ‘comfort’ is very vague. Hence, Weber-Fechner's law is utilized to quantify the pleasant feeling which is treated as a fuzzy quantity. A fuzzy coordination method is used to resolve this difference between power demand curtailment and comfort. The second part of this paper prepares an approach for assessing the amount of peak load clipping when the newly proposed control strategy is adopted in a real-size power system. A decrease in the required generation capacity is estimated provided that the loss of load probability (LOLP) is maintained at the same level before and after the application of the new control strategy. The reduction can be regarded as a dividend of load management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]