User centered energy management scheme for smart buildings

Abstract

Because power grids experience dynamic variations in energy generation and demand, inclusion of renewable energy alone will not assure self-sustainability of smart buildings. Energy sustainability can be achieved by developing an energy friendly, context aware wireless sensor network which is overlaid on the existing electrical network. This smart environment is supported by efficient algorithms for dynamic energy management in smart buildings. Generally, the home energy management system has different functions. These include a) controlling the energy consumption at peak times, b) updating consumers about the real time power consumption inside the home area network, and c) helping the consumer to schedule the operation of appliances based on the real time pricing from the utility company. Also it is very important to analyze how the users can minimize electricity bills while achieving electrical energy conservation with a reasonable level of consumer comfort. The proposed availability based management algorithm (AMA) enhances the existing home energy management system by helping the consumers to supervise and control their monthly electricity tariff payment. The AMA performs an advance initial distribution of energy for upcoming days which helps to keep the power consumption of the residence within a stipulated limit. This research explains and demonstrates, using real data collected from an office building case example, how the AMA works in different scenarios. The results show that the AMA offers effective management of monthly tariff and energy consumption in variable use cases. From the experimentation result, the proposed system achieves 65.08% deduction in energy consumption with the energy unaware system and 30.16% deduction in energy consumption with pattern based energy management system.