Demand side load management using GSM enabled smart energy meter

Demand side load management is a powerful solution to meet the rapidly increasing energy demand. It stabilizes the generation and demand by keeping the electricity usage under control. This paper presents a novel scheme to manage the load and electricity usage by integrating direct load control program with smart metering system. An alert system is designed to acknowledge the instants of increase in contract demand. Power consumers are provided with options to choose either load reduction or penalty prior to utility action. This approach leads to active participation of consumer in direct load control which was earlier a utility driven method. The global service for mobile (GSM) based short message service (SMS) system is used to notify the consumer to act according to the loading condition hence, the technique provides consumer based load scheduling for energy efficient and cost effective load management. Practical realization of the proposed scheme is accomplished using Arduino controller, relay modules, energy meter enabled with RS-485 port, MAX-485 and GSM SIM900.