Cost Analysis of a Smart Home Energy Management System-A Case Study

Bilateral communication facilities between the utility and consumer using smart meter infrastructure enables active participation of residential buildings in demand side management. In this paper, a home energy management system (HEMS) is proposed which optimally schedules the smart home appliances and minimizes the electricity cost. A case study of the proposed methodology has been carried out by adopting the present TOU pricing rates and feed in tariff rates of Kerala State Electricity Board. An appliance operation is modelled in terms of uninterruptible sequence phase for a given load profile with an aim to minimize the electricity cost considering energy requirement and user preference constraints. A mixed integer programming-based optimization algorithm is used for scheduling of smart home appliances and the schedule is generated using IBM ILOG CPLEX optimization solver. Cost comparisons have been done for different cases considering changes in season and the savings have been calculated with and without solar generation for the specimen building under study. The computational study revealed percentage savings were minimum for user preferred schedule.