HomeSim: Comprehensive, smart, residential electrical energy simulation and scheduling

Abstract

Residential energy constitutes 38% of the total energy consumption in the United States [1]. Although a number of building simulators have been proposed, there are no residential electrical energy simulators capable of modeling complex scenarios and exploring the tradeoffs in home energy management. We propose HomeSim, a residential electrical energy simulation platform that enables investigating the impact of technologies such as renewable energy and different battery types. Additionally, HomeSim allows us to simulate different scenarios including centralized vs. distributed in-home energy storage, intelligent appliance rescheduling, and outage management. Using measured residential data, HomeSim quantifies different benefits for different technologies and scenarios, including up to 50% reduction in grid energy through a combination of distributed batteries and reschedulable appliances.