Smart Home Electricity Management in the Context of Local Power Resources and Smart Grid

Abstract

Abstract-This work proposes a smart home electricity management approach that can predict and schedule electricity demand and supply by considering: the 'state' of the smart grid, local power generation capacity, and electrical consumption of household appliances. The prediction of weather conditions and the immediate and longer-term plans of the residential home occupants are crucial parameters in the smart home decision-making system that acts on behalf of the occupants. This paper provides a motivation example and associated scenarios, electrical energy supply/demand models, formalization of the cost optimization problem, and scheduling schemes for a smart home electricity management system in the context of a smart grid, smart appliances, and local renewable energy resources. A case study is provided to illustrate how the proposed approach works.Index Terms-Smart grid, renewable energy, smart home, demand side energy management. I. INTRODUCTIONGlobal renewable energy generation capacity has been rising at a rapid rate in recent years. Renewables are on track to contribute significantly to electric power systems, for example, renewables accounted for almost half of the estimated 208 GW of new electric capacity installed globally in 2011 [1]. In particular, non-hydro renewables have registered a 24% capacity increase over 2010 and have exceeded 390 GW in total. Globally, wind and solar PV accounted for almost 40% and 30% of new renewable capacity, respectively.There is an emerging trend for residential homes on smart grids to have local electric power generation as a portion of electricity supply. Home power local generation usually comes from photovoltaic systems, micro combined heat and power (microCHP) systems, wind turbines, etc. With the incorporation of distributed renewable energy generators, the present power system will be transformed into a large-scale distributed generation system [2], [3]. In the classical centralized power network, electric power flows from power plants to the customer premises in a one-way supply mode. Distributed renewable energy resources bring new situations of local electricity production and two-way electricity flows which dramatically increases the control requirements on the grid. However, advances in information and communication technologies provide the opportunity for efficient data Manuscript received March 15, 2013; revised May 27, 2013. Weiliang Zhao, Lan Ding, and Paul Cooper are with the Sustainable Building Research Centre, Faculty of Engineering, University of Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia (e-mail: {wzhao, lding, pcooper}@ uow.edu.au).Pascal Perez is with the SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia (e-mail: pascal@ uow.edu.au). collection and exchange. Emerging smart grid technologies can potentially change the power network into a digitally enabled electrical grid that collects, analyzes, and acts on information according to the dynamic status of both suppliers and consumers of energy. A smart grid can improve the effi...

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“…When the number of variables to be optimized is too big, the whole variable space searching will become impossible. The previous work 6 has provided an approximate solution of the identified optimization problem based on first principles. The correlations among consumption demands of household appliances have not been considered.…”

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