Energy Optimization for a Smart Home with Renewable Generation

This article looks at optimizing cost of electricity for a small residential microgrid. Each household has renewable generation capability and daily load is portioned into essential and schedulable loads. Dual tariffs exist, for buying and the other for in-feed into the grid. The optimization consist of scheduling decisions for suitable loads as well amount of power to sell or procure from the utility depending on availability and prevailing pricing. Assuming availability of time-variant energy parameters, a global optimization problem is formulated whose solutions leads to quantification of the optimal quantity of energy purchased and sold for each of the households. When the unrealistic assumption of availability of information is removed from the implementation of the global optimization, an online algorithm that only requires the current values of the time varying supply and demand processes shows by simulation that the distributed algorithm can realise credible scheduling of prosumer household electricity usage.