Demand response for renewable energy integration and load balancing in smart grid communities

This paper proposes a demand response strategy for energy management within a smart grid community of residential households. Some of the households own renewable energy systems and energy storage systems (ESS) and sell the excess renewable energy to the residences that need electrical energy. The proposed strategy comprises methods that provide benefits for the residential electricity users and for the load aggregator. Specifically, we propose an off-line algorithm that schedules the renewable resources integration by trading energy between the renewable energy producers and buyers. Moreover, we propose a geometric programming based optimization method that uses the ESS for balancing the community's power grid load and for reducing the grid consumption cost. Simulations show that the proposed method may lead to a community's grid consumption cost reduction of 10.5%. It may also achieve balanced load profiles with peak to average ratio (PAR) close to unity, the average PAR reduction being 52%.