  Electricity peaks can be harmful to grid stability and result in additional
generation costs to balance supply with demand. By developing a network of
smart appliances together with a quasi-decentralized control protocol, direct
load control (DLC) provides an opportunity to reduce peak consumption by
directly controlling the on/off switch of the networked appliances. This paper
proposes a packetized DLC (PDLC) solution that is illustrated by an application
to air conditioning temperature control. Here the term packetized refers to a
fixed time energy usage authorization. The consumers in each room choose their
preferred set point, and then an operator of the local appliance pool will
determine the comfort band around the set point. We use a thermal dynamic model
to investigate the duty cycle of thermostatic appliances. Three theorems are
proposed in this paper. The first two theorems evaluate the performance of the
PDLC in both transient and steady state operation. The first theorem proves
that the average room temperature would converge to the average room set point
with fixed number of packets applied in each discrete interval. The second
theorem proves that the PDLC solution guarantees to control the temperature of
all the rooms within their individual comfort bands. The third theorem proposes
an allocation method to link the results in theorem 1 and assumptions in
theorem 2 such that the overall PDLC solution works. The direct result of the
theorems is that we can reduce the consumption oscillation that occurs when no
control is applied. Simulation is provided to verify theoretical results.
