Swarm Grid: Collective synchronization of electricity grid devices

The electricity grid has to respond to large power variations in relatively short periods of time. This behavior causes an inefficiency operation and design of the electricity system. The Demand Side-Management techniques are used to modify the power demand, reducing or smoothing its shape. Moreover, the electricity grid is a very huge system composed for millions of devices. There are problems associated with the density and distance between elements. The development of new technologies has increased the complexity of the grid in the last years. In this framework, the Smart Grid arises. The inclusion of communication technologies into the grid allows a better monitoring and control of the system. Smart Grid systems must be able to manage thousands or even millions of devices to increase the efficiency of the electricity grid, but they have also to satisfy the classical grid constrictions. The amount of information and calculus of the Smart Grid management system should be reduced. For these reasons, our studies about the electricity grid synchronization are based on a distributed design. Specifically, they are focus on the Swarm Intelligence theory. The Swarm Intelligence theory is inspired on biological systems, concretely on the self-organized behavior of several species. The elements or agents follow very simple rules sensing the local environment and with a certain random degree. For these reasons, these algorithms are good candidates to solve the problem of the electricity grid synchronization, creating what we have called the “Swarm Grid”. The aggregated consumption of the grid is a time variant function with peaks and valleys. The electricity grid generation has to follow this function in order to supply the power demand. An example of the typical aggregated consumption for a weekly day in Spain is shown in Figure 1. Therefore, the electricity grid has to respond to large power variations in relatively short periods of time. This behavior causes an inefficiency operation and design of the electricity system. On the operation side, there is a poor performance because of generation power swings: generation must always supply power demand, therefore abrupt changes in the demand cause generation power swings, together with increases in operation stress and losses. On the design side, the electricity grid must be sized to supply the peak power demand: the power difference between valleys and peaks implies that the electricity grid must be over-sized. Several power plants and lines are designed to supply the power demand during the peak hours and they are not used during the rest of the day. One technical solution to minimize these problems is to flatten the power demand curve, reducing the difference between peaks and valleys. The techniques used to modify the power