Hardware home energy management system for monitoring the quality of energy service at small consumers

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This paper presents a laboratory hardware system, developed in the Department of Electrical Power Systems of University Politehnica of Bucharest, that simulate an energy management system to be applied in a smart home. The core of the system is a controller that is capable of switching on/off various domestic appliances as a response to price signals. The system may be capable of communicating with all loads and with the main meter, and may provide information about the power quality. Also, the system may be capable of responding to supplier's signals in order to provide a demand response service. According to Siemens (5), the buildings are responsible for 40% of the world energy consumption and for 21% of the total greenhouse emissions. For these reasons, buildings are key elements in the targets to reduce the energy consumption and to implement sustainable development programs. Implementation of advanced technologies and transforming the buildings into manageable entities may help reducing the greenhouse emissions by up to 40%. The smart home concept, together with the energy management systems for small applications, are normal evolutions in the implementation process of the smart grids concept towards transforming the traditional consumers in more active ones, becoming in some cases prosumers. Various solutions have been proposed in the literature, and innovative projects have been implemented in pilot projects, many of them focusing on metering and data management. A connected home platform and development framework for design, development and deployment of smart home services is presented in (2), whereas a lightweight key establishment protocol for smart home energy management systems and the implementation details of the protocol are proposed in (3). One challenging technical issues is the compatibility between equipments. The Zigbee technology for application in the smart home is presented in (4), where a new routing protocol DMPR (Disjoint Multi Path based Routing) to improve the performance of the ZigBee sensor networks is proposed. The interaction between the user and the home energy management system is decisive in helping the customer to easily adopt the new technology. A user interaction interface for energy management in smart homes is proposed in (5). Various control and optimization algorithms have been proposed. An optimal and automatic residential energy consumption scheduling framework which attempts to achieve a desired trade-off between minimizing the electricity payment and minimizing the waiting time for the operation of each appliance in household in the presence of a real-time pricing tariff combined with inclining block rates is proposed in (6). Authors of (7) and (8) propose optimization algorithms to be implemented in the home energy management systems to determine the optimal operation of residential appliances within 5-minute time slots while considering uncertainties in real-time electricity prices.