LFC System Incorporating Real-Time Estimated Air Conditioning Load Capacity based on Consumers' Comfort

One promising approach to suppressing frequency fluctuations in the power system is to actively control the power consumption of air conditioners as demand-side resources. However, maintaining consumers' thermal comfort and fairness among consumers remains a challenge. This paper proposes an air conditioning load control system that supports load frequency control (LFC) and simultaneously maintains thermal comfort and fairness. The aggregator estimates real-time air conditioning load capacity based on consumers' comfort, and allocates LFC signals fairly. In addition, consumers with similar characteristics are clustered, limiting two-way communication to representative consumers and thereby reducing communication load. Numerical simulations indicate that the proposed system not only achieves frequency regulation performance comparable to conventional system, but also improves both comfort and fairness. Furthermore, the study evaluates the trade-off between control performance and implementation complexity.