Home load and solar power management under real-time prices

The concept of demand response, although is not new, is becoming more and more interesting among private companies in restructured environments. Demand side potentials can be the solution of several issues such as required huge investments, market powers, energy efficiency, and environmental issues. Home load management problem, as an automated tool for activating the potential of small residential customers, is significantly considered during the past years. However, to the authors' best knowledge, the home load management problem for a residential customer who installed a PV installation is not considered yet. This paper aims to extend the existing home load management models to incorporate the generation of a PV installation whose production can be forecasted with some uncertainties. The uncertainty of the solar power is considered by the well-known scenario based stochastic programming approach. The objective of the model, as it is usual, is to minimize the expected energy cost. The model is formulated in a mixed integer linear form which can be simply solved via commercially available software packages. The effectiveness of the model is demonstrated by applying it to a typical house with a few responsive appliances and a PV installation.