  Driven by the need to offset the variability of wind and solar generation on
the electrical grid, development of load controls is a highly active field in
the engineering literature. However, practical use of residential loads for
grid balancing and ancillary services remains rare, in part due to the relative
cost of communicating with hordes of small loads and also due to the limited
experimentation done so far to demonstrate reliable operation. To establish a
basis for the safe and reliable use of fleets of small compressor loads as
distributed energy resources (DERs), we have constructed an experimental
testbed in a laboratory, so that load coordination schemes can be tested at
extreme conditions within a laboratory environment. This experiment can be used
to tune a simulation testbed to which it can then be linked, thereby augmenting
the effective size of the ensemble of loads. Control algorithms can simply be
plugged in for testing. Modeling of the system was done both to demonstrate the
experimental testbed's behavior and also to understand how to tune the behavior
of each participating model house in the system. Implementing this testbed has
been useful for the rapid turnaround of experiments on various control types,
and it enables testing year-round without the constraints and limitations
arising in seasonal field tests with real human participants.
