Electric Energy Management in the Smart Home: Perspectives on Enabling Technologies and Consumer Behavior
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States government or any agency thereof.
- A consumer may purchase a hybrid vehicle to decrease carbon emissions, reduce dependency on foreign oil, save money, or simply as a status symbol.
II. SMART HOMES
- A home is already a well-designed connector for power transfer between the electricity grid and energy-consuming appliances.
- Looking inward, a smart home employs automated home energy management (AHEM), an elegant network that self manages end-use systems based on information flowing from the occupants and the smart meter.
- If these structures are implemented to provide a tangible financial incentive for customers to respond to the requests of the service providers for demand reduction, the customers can receive measurable monetary value for their participation, in addition to the increased reliability of their service.
- Most utilities offer incentives for energy upgrades such as attic insulation or ENERGY STAR® appliances and many have leveraged loadshedding technologies that cycle air conditioners during peak load events.
- Emerging nonintrusive load measurement systems can provide enabling data, but these modern measurement techniques are not yet robust, accurate, easy to install, or cost-effective for integration at the meter [19].
III. ASSETS AND CONTROLS
- In smart homes, many loads can be considered as assets that can participate in the efficient use of electric energy: thermal loads, electric vehicles, and smart appliances.
- A smart home controller could pre-cool a house in the morning, before the system peak load, reducing air conditioning loads when signaled from the utility.
- Renewable resources, battery storage, and potentially vehicle charging could all interconnect on a DC bus.
- Almost all loads are, or could be, equipped with intelligent controllers, ranging from simple on/off control of state lighting, to sophisticated controllers for photovoltaic systems, vehicle chargers, and large loads such as air conditioning.
- Analogously, smart homes may span the spectrum from the simple addition of discrete features – such as smart appliances or remotely controllable lighting and thermostats – to an automatically controlled, highly coordinated self-learning system with grid interaction.
IV. ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES
- Enabling technologies for smart homes mostly fall into two broad categories: utility-side and customer-side, and may be further enhanced through policy and legislation.
- This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications.
- These mechanisms may impact the habits and comfort of the user and cause acceptance issues.
- These effects will be explored in section V. A proper use of DR mechanisms may help end-users reduce their electricity bills in exchange for a moderate impact on their comfort, while utilities can achieve significant savings by avoiding the need to build new generation capacity or to buy expensive peak power.
- Smart meters are usually capable of much more than this by including the ability to communicate with in-home appliances, programmable communicating thermostats (PCTs), and other loads.
V. CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
- The impact of technological advancement is acknowledged as an important enabler for the expansion of smart homes, an integral part of the equation is influencing the behavior of the occupant vis-à-vis energy usage with information and education [32].
- Numerous studies have examined the effect of diverse forms of feedback on residential electricity usage.
- In particular, feedback studies vary in their recruitment strategies and some have methodological features that limit their generalizability.
- Automation will be an important component of smart homes and should not be viewed as a way to override the consumer but rather to increase the convenience of efficient choices [32].
- Reducing costs was also an important consideration [64].
VI. CONCLUSION
- Smart homes rely on numerous enabling technologies in both the electricity grid and consumer electronics.
- Given that buyin from users is a key that will unlock the adoption of smart homes, rigorous tests with consumers must be integrated into the smart home design procedure.
- Without the comprehensive multi-disciplinary assessment of the smart home, an expensive system may fall short of expectations.
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