A COLUMN GENERATION METHOD FOR OPTIMAL LOAD MANAGEMENT VIA CONTROL OFELECTRIC WATER-HEATERS

Electric water heaters have been the focus of several previous studies where they are viewed as energy storing devices to be considered for peak load shaving within device interruption based load management pro grams. It is well known that such controls, when applied indiscriminat ely, can cause payback phenomena which could actually worsen existing peak loads. Thus, optimal switching strategies must be devised. A colu mn generation based optimization scheme which combines the advantages of linear programming and dynamic programming approaches, both previou sly proposed in the load management literature, is presented. The meth od is successfully tested on a representative set of residential elect ric water heating load mixes. The results are analyzed in the paper, b oth from the computational and load management point of view.