Using KNX based home automation system to optimize energy efficiency in a domestic application

Abstract

In the past decade, environmental awareness amongst consumers of electricity has picked up momentum and controlling energy consumption is an economical way of improving energy efficiency. The growing demand for automation systems in homes has made the implementation for energy management algorithms achievable. The objective of this project was to implement a home energy management system to reduce the occurrence of peak loads and decrease customer electricity bill cost. Initially, a detailed power consumption analysis and load profile are constructed for each selected power-intensive home appliance. This analysis would then be used to set up a typical one-day power usage profile. As an encouragement to modify habitual energy usage patterns, consumers are entitled to incentive-based demand response strategies. In this project, a load-shifting technique is proposed, which is aimed at optimizing customers’ daily household energy costs by scheduling loads from peak load periods to off-peak periods according to a dynamic Time-of-Use tariff. Over the past few years, subsidy schemes provided for renewable energy sources caused a notable increase in investment in photovoltaic (PV) systems in the residential sector. This project also analyses the effect on the daily cost of electricity if the energy generated from a photovoltaic system is utilized for self-consumption, in conjunction with a dynamic Time-ofUse tariff. The simulated results concluded that by having an automatic load-shifting algorithm in conjunction with PV generated energy and a time-varying incentive, this would result in a reduction in the daily overall cost of imported electricity. Moreover, it was demonstrated that the scheduling algorithm can be implemented through a load-switching algorithm via KNX communication protocol.