Electric Spring-Based Power Flow Routers for Economic Enhancement of the Microgrid Cluster Based on Smart Homes

High penetrations of intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) in smart homes necessitate the power flow management. The recently proposed electric springs (ES), as alternatives to the conventional energy storage systems (ESS), can regulate the power flow with smaller battery capacities as compared to that of the ESS. This greatly increases the economic value of smart homes, as batteries of the domestic ESS are quite expensive. In this paper, a concept of having the ES equipped with communicate ports that connect with a home user’s portable devices, hereon known as ES-based power flow routers (PFR), to mitigate the distribution line power loss, is proposed. By raising the power utilization, the economic value can be further enhanced. Case studies are carried out in MATLAB/SIMULINK to verify the effectiveness of ES in stabilizing a five-bus home microgrid, instead of using the conventional ESS. Besides, it is validated that the ES-based PFR can save substantial payments of electricity bills through the reduction of the distribution power loss.