Cost-effective and comfort-aware residential energy management under different pricing schemes and weather conditions

Nowadays with the emerging of smart micro-grids(SM-Gs) in residential sectors, a large portion of energy consumption can be saved through optimal scheduling of household devices and management of domestic hybrid energy sources. By the aid of such technologies, residential consumers have the capability to mitigate their energy costs and satisfy their own requirements paying less attention to the configuration of the energy supply system. This paper presents a novel residential energy management system (REMS) to improve the efficiency of energy consumption in a typical SM-G taking into account minimum cost of energy as well as maximum user's comfort level as competitive objectives. The optimization model is also formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear problem (MINLP) and its performance is tested under different operating scenarios with real data. The simulation results show that the proposed model not only reduces energy consumption costs, but also ensures a comfortable lifestyle for occupants. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.