A smart home demand-side management system considering solar photovoltaic generation

Lately, over the past decade both the growing environmental awareness and the subsidies provided for renewable energy sources triggered a remarkable residential investment in photovoltaic (PV) systems. Although this is a desirable change, the effects of these widespread distributed energy resources (DER) have to be considered, both financial and technical aspects. The intermittent electricity production of PV systems brings several issues on the grid operator's side. In order to be able to control and take the DER's production into the grid without risking power quality, demand side management (DSM) can make positive effects on this issue at residential level. Also the electricity provider's tariff structure has to be considered at the optimization of the monetary costs. In this paper an intelligent residential DSM system for a rooftop installed residential PV is introduced. The applied DSM technique aims to reduce costs of the customer and also power losses on the grid. In order to avoid reducing the consumer's convenience significantly, a scheduling algorithm is applied, using historical data of the consumer's habits and PV generation forecasts.