Publications

A distributed approach to taming peak demand

Sabolish, Michael; Amer, Ahmed; Kroeger, Thomas M.

A significant portion of all energy capacity is wasted in over-provisioning to meet peak demand. The current state-of-the-art in reducing peak demand requires central authorities to limit device usage directly, and are generally reactive. We apply techniques drawn from established distributed computing principles to propose a novel and proactive solution to decentralize management of demand and to provide a more scalable and resilient approach to reducing overall peak demand. We demonstrate that such a system approaches the performance of an ideal centralized control authority, and experimentally demonstrate a 10-25% reduction in peak energy demand under conservative assumptions. Under worst-case demand scenarios, our approach has the potential to reduce peak demand by 65-85%. © 2012 IEEE.