Energy management in a "smart home" with integrated solar cells, electric vehicles and heat pumps

The Department of Energy Technology, Aalborg University has led one project under Dansk Energis Elforsk's program: 350-005: Energy management in a "smart home" with inte-grated solar cells, electric vehicles and heat pumps.

Smart Homes (SH) can use a variety of renewable energy sources, including photovoltaic (PV) arrays, micro-wind turbine, Heat Pumps (HPs), and Plug-in Electric Vehicle (PEV) as an energy storage. Due to the integration of volatile renewable energy resources, stochastic PEVs mobility patterns, and random energy consumption in the buildings, uncertainties have become the major concerns for the operation of energy-efficient in the buildings.

Thus, incorporating uncertainty into the scheduling process has the potential to improve energy efficiency. In this project, a novel stochastic model predictive controller (MPC) will be applied for a smart home with the integration of renewable energy resources, HPs, and PEVs. The main objective of this project is minimization of the daily electricity consumption cost by using flexible renewable resources in an efficient way, while also regarding the uncertainties.

The HEMS Center includes a centralized intelligent control that equips households with monitoring modules and control functions based on the home communication network. The house gateway, such as smart meter, can be used as an interactive communication interface between electrical installations and the smart building. PEVs / EVs and HPs are special types of loads that can be planned.

PEVs / EVs not only consume energy from the grid, but also constitute an emergency stream for other household consumption within the smart community. Therefore, PEVs and space heating with HPs are promising candidates for demand-side management (DSM) applications. In addition, they are well suited to the electrification of the transport and heating sector as well as to the energy efficiency of buildings, which are seen as key roads to low-emission energy systems along with an increase in the use of renewable energy sources. Today, the electricity distributed from renewable energy sources in residential areas most often includes photovoltaic systems. Due to the inevita-ble fluctuating and random energy production of photovoltaic systems, the energy storage units play a key role in improving the power quality and energy efficiency as well as in maintaining the reliability of the energy system.

HEMS is an important home system for successful demand management of the smart electricity network. With the rapid development of advanced power electronics and alternative energy technologies, renewable and stored energy sources installed in residential areas can be incorporated into HEMS with the aim of improving the efficiency of energy con-version and utilization.

In this way, HEMS is defined as the optimal system for the provision of energy management services to efficiently monitor and manage electricity production, storage and consumption in smart buildings. Thanks to easy installation and low cost, photovoltaic systems are widespread in smart buildings. Panel current can vary greatly due to weather conditions, local transient shade and the time of day. If left unchecked, there may be a significant impact on the electricity grid, including degraded performance, congestion and overproduction, especially when using large-scale production units and PEVs.

Therefore, stochastic dynamic energy planning is essential. Thus, it will be a very interesting topic for future work to develop effective control for the integration of PEVs and renewable en-ergy in household consumption and the electricity grid.