Autonomous Appliance Scheduling for Household Energy Management

Abstract

The advancement of renewable energy technologies has seen the emergence of customer owned grid tied wind and solar microgrids. These microgrids offer an opportunity to energy users to lower their energy costs as well as enabling the power suppliers to regulate the utility grid. However, the integration of the renewable energy based sources into the smart grid increases the complexity of the main grid. The success of this scheme will be heavily reliant on accurate real-time information exchange between the microgrid, the main grid, and the consumers. The communication between these agents will be critical in implementation of intelligent decisions by the smart grid. The microgrids will be required to relay energy forecasts information to the utility grid. Similarly, customers will be expected to submit energy demand schedules, to actively monitor energy price signals, to participate in energy bids, and to respond to energy management signals in real time. This kind of grid-user interaction will be overwhelming and could result in consumer apathy. There is therefore a need to develop smart systems that will autonomously execute all these tasks without the prompting of the customers. This paper presents one such approach. In this study, we proposed a demand side energy management for a grid connected household with a locally generated photovoltaic energy. To ensure efficient household energy management, smart scheduling of electrical appliances has also been presented.