Design and implementation of home energy and power management and control system

Abstract

Efficient use of electric energy by users is one of the critical ways for increasing energy efficiency, reducing cost of power generation and supply, and environmental concerns. As part of remedial measures to address issues of energy use, many technologies for demand reduction ranging from energy saving devices through a variety of energy management systems have emerged to help users manage and control their consumption. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a home energy and power management system that enables users to monitor, regulate, and manage their demand response dynamically through scheduling and controlling of their appliances using a mobile application. At the crux of the power management system is an embedded microcontroller which is encoded with schemes for monitoring, managing, scheduling and controlling operations. The user interface on the mobile device directly communicates with the power management system via integrated Raspberry Pi server that uses Wi-Fi communication protocol while communication between the Raspberry Pi and the embedded microcontroller is based on Bluetooth communication. A numerical simulation of the proposed design was first developed and a prototype of the design was implemented and tested. The test results show that the system was able to effectively monitor, control and regulate the power usage in the home. The flexibility offered by the system allows the user to self-regulate the amount of power usage, which translates into cost savings with the overall effect of flattening of the demand peaks.