Resource Provisioning in the Electrical Grid

Abstract

Transformers and storage systems in the electrical grid must be provisioned or sized just as routers and buffers must be sized in the Internet. We prove the formal equivalence between these two systems and use this insight to apply teletraffic theory to sizing the electrical grid, obtaining the capacity region corresponding to a given transformer and storage size. We conduct a fine-grained measurement study of household electrical load. These measurements are essential for two reasons. First, we use them to construct reference models for home loads; these models are used to find the capacity region using the teletraffic theory. Second, these measurements are used in numerical simulations that are done to validate our analysis. More specifically, we compare results of numerical simulations with the results from teletraffic theory. We show not only that teletraffic theory agrees well with numerical simulations but also that it closely matches with the heuristics used in current practice. Moreover, our analysis permits us to develop sizing rules for battery storage electrical grid, advancing the state of the art.