Local Energy Management Unit for Residential Applications

Abstract

Along the coming years, an important increase of the energy consumption in the world is expected, what will lead the energy sector to deal with several challenges such us availability of delivering the demanded energy, increase of the emissions and greenhouse effect. Energy Management Systems are being integrated with domestic and residential applications, which optimize the home energy consumption. The Local Energy Management Unit is presented in this paper that allows an optimized power demand to the Grid. It utilizes different types of communication (by using TCP and X10 protocols) with the aim of obtaining an efficient energy management and allowing a lower power consumption, which lets the user to decrease the cost of the electric invoice. A prototype has been built that shows energy management results. The power demanded from the Grid is kept constant regardless of the house power consumption.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eee.19.7.5164