Impact of wired telecommunication network latency on demand-side management in smart grids

Demand-side management relies on the flexibility of consumers’ load to avoid electrical network issues, including grid congestion. Recent advances in smart grid systems (also called Energy Internet) allow using demand-side management reactive strategies based on the dynamical shedding of residential consumers appliances. Both centralized and decentralized approaches are considered in literature, depending on the considered system size, but only few contributions consider the potential impact of the telecommunication network on their performance. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis on a realistic scenario based on representative power consumption time series of a residential power system. Our results show that latency may have a significant impact on energy management strategies in terms of performance for the smart grid, and that it should be considered when designing such strategies.