A Study on Load Factor Improvement by a Co-ordinated Control of Air Conditioner Operations

Abstract

In recent years, a drastic increase in the number of air conditioners has caused a sharp and narrow peak load in summer seasons due to their inherent temperature sensitive operational characteristics. Power system operational costs can greatly be reduced through an improvement in the load factor, relaxing an impending need of installing new generating plants.
The main purpose of this study is to reduce the peak power demand by a co-ordinated regulation of a large number of air conditioners that otherwise operate independently. The authors have been studying the effect of the regulation on peak clip by computer simulations. Although a simple reguration scheme is effective to suppress a high peak demand in the time horizon of 2 or 3 hours, a daily peak cannot be reduced only by this scheme. The introductions of priority in the control of each air conditioner group and a small step increase and decrease in temperature settings has been effective to suppress a daily peak load as planned without a large payback. Computer simulations have been carried out on a total of 65 air conditioners that are operating under different environments. Simulations have clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method on both daily peak clip and suppression of temporal high peak.