A novel distributed control framework for thermostatically controlled loads cluster

Abstract Renewable energy is developing rapidly, and its intermittency and uncertainty pose a serious challenge to the grid’s regulation capability. Demand response, as a crucial means of integrating flexible load-side resources, has become a key technology in alleviating grid pressure. This paper focuses on thermostatically controlled loads and proposes a novel distributed control framework. The framework decouples the load control loop by dividing the control process into a short distributed coordination phase and a long local tracking phase. This approach significantly reduces communication requirements of the load nodes. Through mathematical derivations, numerical simulations, and hardware-in-the-loop experiments, the theoretical feasibility and practical effectiveness of the proposed framework are validated.