Smart Load Node for Nonsmart Load Under Smart Grid Paradigm: A New Home Energy Management System

This article presents an approach for efficient operation of nonsmart household appliances under a smart grid environment using the proposed smart load node (SLN). In a real-world scenario, there are many nonsmart loads currently in use, and embedding appliance-specific intelligence into them to turn them into smart loads will be more expensive compared to the proposed SLN, which is a common solution for all types of nonsmart loads. This makes the proposed low-cost SLN, which neither requires any infrastructural change in the electrical wiring of a house nor any constructional change in home appliances at the manufacturing stage and at the consumer end, a feasible solution for intelligent operation of nonsmart home appliances under a smart grid environment. The SLNs, which are placed in a home, like distributed wireless sensor nodes, form a home area network (HAN). The HAN includes a load management unit (LMU) that acts as master for all distributed SLNs. Wi-Fi is chosen as a medium of communication in the HAN. The LMU incorporates a load management algorithm that is written in Python script.