Avoiding Overages by Deferred Aggregate Demand for PEV Charging on the Smart Grid

The authors model the aggregate overnight demand for electricity by a large community of (possibly hybrid) Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) each of whose power demand follows a prescribed profile and is interruptible. Rather than a spot-price system for household consumers (which would necessarily need to be operated by automated means overnight when most consumers sleep), the "Grid" (regional utility) is "Smart" in that it monitors its total load and, when overages threaten, can reduce load by signaling certain consumers to interrupt charging and defer their charging load by one unit of time. In this paper, they model the uninterrupted load by a Gaussian process which they justify by means of a Functional Central Limit Theorem (FCLT).