Design and Development of an Intelligent Tool for Retail Electric Provider Plan Selection

In this paper, an intelligent tool for retail electric provider plan selection is designed and developed for the residential customers and prosumers. The main objective of this tool is to provide decision support to the residential customers to enable them to make a feasible selection of local distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar photovoltaic and battery energy storage as well as plug-in electric vehicles that will maximize the savings on their energy bill. In conjunction with decision support in finding feasible combinations of resources, a suitable retail electric provider is also chosen that will minimize their annual energy bill. In total, 48 homes were evaluated, 17 representative profiles of rooftop solar photovoltaic, home battery energy storage and plug-in electric vehicles as well as 24 retail electric provider plans consisting of flat, tiered and time-of-use plans were evaluated from Austin, Texas. This tool was designed using a knowledge base of rules for decision support and the difference in the minimum annual energy bills, before and after the resources are added to the homes, are used to calculate the personalized energy bill savings of the prosumers. This tool was implemented in MATLAB App-designer software.