Critical kick-back mitigation through improved design of demand response

The energy sector is adopting a lot of intermittent renewable energy sources nowadays. In order to successfully integrate these renewable sources, demand side resources (DSR), in a demand response (DR) setup, are able to provide power system services by exploiting their flexibility in power consumption. Load kick-back effect describes a dynamic process that the total power consumption of a population of DSRs is higher than the expected value during the steady state after the activation of DR program, due to their temporary synchronous behaviors. For DR programs designed with little consideration of load kick-back, not only the potential value of DR is limited significant but also power system operation can be jeopardized even more. In addition to explaining the severity of kick-back effect through illustrative examples, this paper proposes several methods to mitigate the critical kick-back effect in DR while maintaining the expected value of DR. The proposed methods are applied to a DR program that aims at using thermostatically controlled heating of residential houses for peak shaving. Quality measures are adopted to measure the performance.