Management of loads in residential buildings installed with PV system under intermittent solar irradiation using mixed integer linear programming

Abstract

One of the challenges of utilizing solar PV in residential buildings is the management of load in accordance to the intermittent nature of solar resource. In this paper, Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is proposed to effectively plan and allocate load for consumption in such a way that the user defined priority of loads are conserved. In this way, the loads are made to follow the battery state of charge in accordance to the intermittent nature of solar resource without adversely affecting the quality of life of the user. In doing this, energy audit of a typical 4-bedroom residential building belonging to a medium-income family is carried out and classified into controllable and non-controllable loads. The energy audit is also used to size the PV system and the battery bank taking into consideration the financial status of the user (i.e. adequately sized and under-sized PV system based on financial status of the user). A load manager based on MILP with solar resource load following capability is thereafter developed and implemented in a computational program to manage the load based on user’s priority. Six scenarios are created to gain insights into the effectiveness of the proposed load manager. The results reveal that the proposed technique is effective in allocating loads based on the available solar resource in such a way that the user priority is maintained.