Technical Measures to Mitigate Load Fluctuation for Large-Scale Customers to Improve Power System Energy Efficiency

Abstract

Industrial equipment such as electric arc furnaces and steel mills are often associated with rapid and high load disturbances, so their power systems require additional control equipment to limit the frequency. However, proper ancillary service fees are not paid in these cases with extreme and variable load demands. The frequency regulation reserve equipment adds to power generation costs. Therefore, variable power generation loads lead to increases in the cost of energy production. We propose a load frequency control method that is applied on the customer end instead of the power supply end to reduce the operating reserve required to improve the energy efficiency of the power system. We analyzed the load fluctuation of steel mill customers using real data sampled at two-second intervals from the energy management system in Korea. We developed an automatic generation control program to simulate the power system’s frequency characteristics. We also propose compensation techniques for mitigation of the system’s frequency deviation at the customer end based on an energy storage system, pump storage hydro generator, customer generator, and plant process adjustment. To recover the frequency deviation, we calculated the compensation facility capacity and analyzed static characteristics, and we proved the feasibility via simulations.