Feasibility study of a standalone DC house: Energy savings opportunities and capital costs assessment

The advancements in power electronics technology have resulted in the excessive emerging of various DC appliances. This necessitates investigating the feasibility of adopting a complete DC house that combines all such DC appliances in one simple network in order to build a more efficient and energy-saving houses for modern and smart cities. An essential point of view is to compare such DC network with a corresponding conventional AC network as well as hybrid networks in terms of energy consumption and cost analysis. This paper discusses the design, analysis and comparison of different low voltage AC and DC networks. The analysis is presented for a standalone house, in which several distribution schemes are proposed and analyzed. The proposed layouts present preliminary supplying AC appliances by an AC source. On the other hand, another configuration discusses designing a complete DC network consisting of DC sources and loads. In addition, hybrid systems are also proposed in which combinations of different AC and DC sources and loads are incorporated into the same network. The proposed configurations are studied and evaluated in terms of several points of view including energy consumption, systems sizing, required components and capital costs assessment. Different test scenarios are carried out for all proposed architectures and all findings and conclusions are analyzed extensively in this paper.