Enabling customer demand and budget management in the real-time pricing environment

Traditionally, most end-use residential consumers receive flat rate monthly electricity bills based on load profiling rate calculations. Those flat rates do not relate and reflect the true and time-varying costs of electricity supply during actual time of consumptions. Without acknowledging the cost differences, consumers do not have any incentive to adjust their load consumption patterns, and inefficiencies of resource allocations can result. Crises and markets failures are often originated from these wholesale and retail market disconnections. Our previously proposed load control strategies (Steps of Temperatures and Pricing Naming) are implemented and integrated to our prototype. The system can serve as a tool to assist end-use residential consumers for their load and budget managements in real-time pricing environments, like Illinois (where 4.5 million consumers can participate in such program). Other features can further add-on to enhance the proposed system (e.g., home security and surveillance system).