Household CO2-efficient energy management

Abstract

Residential and commercial buildings are responsible for one third of the total (CO2) emissions in the European Union, which are the main cause of global warming. Although the thermal load has long been considered the primary reason of domestic energy consumptions, the increasing demand for electricity has a non-negligible environmental impact, given that about 40% of electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. Moreover, the amount of CO2 emitted to produce one kWh can greatly vary in time, depending on the sources used to generate it. For instance, the German electricity emissions intensity factor varied in 2017 between 113 and 533 gCO2eq/kWh. This paper proposes a novel CO2-efficient energy management approach to schedule household appliances while minimizing carbon dioxide emissions, given the possibility to change energy carriers (i.e., natural gas and electricity) and to shift loads in time. Several common loads are considered, and their operation is scheduled according to the emission factor of the German power grid. The results show that switching energy carriers can successfully enable up to 40% emissions reductions while indicating that shifting loads in time has little impact.