Interactive Energy Management System to Avoid Rolling Blackouts

Many developing countries in the world face a severe shortage in power generation, where the generation cannot meet peak demands. To match supply with demand, utilities reduce the demand by adopting rolling blackouts. Therefore, people in most cities of those countries suffer from almost daily blackouts. In this paper, an effective strategy to avoid these daily blackouts is proposed. The strategy limits the energy demand only in case of power generation shortage. The strategy takes the fairness in distributing electrical power among all the social classes of residential customers into consideration. From the principle of “something is better than nothing”, in case of shortage in generation, the customers who significantly causing the critical peak will be forced to reduce their consumption (according to a proposed algorithm) rather than completely disconnecting electricity. Simulink environment is used to validate the strategy. The results clearly showed the effectiveness of the strategy to prevent critical peaks, and consequently, to prevent blackouts.