Near real-time management of appliances, distributed generation and electric vehicles for demand response participation

Consumer-centric energy management approaches are emerging as a major solution for future power systems. In this context, intelligent home management systems should manage different kinds of devices existing in the houses assuring convenient comfort levels and understanding the users’ behaviour. At the same time, the home management systems should be able to interact with other actors such as energy communities, aggregators, and system operators. The main contribution of this work is a new methodology allowing intelligent management, in near real-time (1 minute), of different types of energy resources existing in a smart home. The energy resources include appliances and other loads, micro-generation, and electric vehicles. The proposed system includes a permanent evaluation of the operation state of each energy resource considering their functional model and the behaviour and comfort level defined by the users. Participation in demand response programs reducing the power consumption limits is also considered showing the advantage of the proposed approach. The case study contains two scenarios considering a demand response program of power limitation with 120 minutes duration. To guarantee participation in these demand response events, the system should evaluate the priority of each device according to its model. A domestic consumer with 45 energy resources (appliances, generation, and electric vehicles) is used for demonstration purposes.