Automatic optimal multi-energy management of smart homes

Abstract

Residential and commercial buildings are responsible for approximately 35% of carbon emissions in industrialized countries. Making buildings more efficient and sustainable is, therefore, a fundamental step toward a low-carbon energy society. A key to achieving sustainability is by leveraging on energy storage systems and smart technologies to switch between energy carriers in order to optimize environmental impact. However, the research on energy management in buildings has mostly focused on its economic aspect, overlooking the environmental dimension. Additionally, the concept of energy system flexibility has been mostly proposed as the ability to shift demand over time or, at most, to curtail it, aiming at reducing the system’s operating costs. We propose a multi-energy multi-objective scheduling model to optimally manage the supply, demand, and interchange of multiple energy carriers, based on dynamic price and carbon emission signals. Our holistic and integrated approach is applied to a group of 200 smart homes with varying thermal and electric loads, and equipped with different types of smart technologies. The effectiveness of the approach in reducing the home carbon footprint, while remunerating the users, is evaluated using historical and statistical data of three European countries.