This paper presents one of the first real-life demonstrations of coordinated
and distributed resource control for secondary frequency response in a power
distribution grid. We conduct a series of tests with up to 69 heterogeneous
active devices consisting of air handling units, unidirectional and
bidirectional electric vehicle charging stations, a battery energy storage
system, and 107 passive devices consisting of building loads and photovoltaic
generators. Actuation commands for the test devices are obtained by solving an
economic dispatch problem at every regulation instant using distributed
ratio-consensus, primal-dual, and Newton-like algorithms. The distributed
control setup consists of a set of Raspberry Pi end-points exchanging messages
via an ethernet switch. The problem formulation minimizes the sum of device
costs while tracking the setpoints provided by the system operator. We
demonstrate accurate and fast real-time distributed computation of the
optimization solution and effective tracking of the regulation signal by
measuring physical device outputs over 40-minute time horizons. We also perform
an economic benefit analysis which confirms eligibility to participate in an
ancillary services market and demonstrates up to $53K of potential annual
revenue for the selected population of devices.