A three-step methodology to improve domestic energy efficiency

Increasing energy prices and the greenhouse effect lead to more awareness of energy efficiency of electricity supply. During the last years, a lot of technologies have been developed to improve this efficiency. Next to large scale technologies such as wind turbine parks, domestic technologies are developed. These domestic technologies can be divided in (1) Distributed Generation (DG), (2) Energy Storage and (3) Demand Side Load Management. Control algorithms optimizing a combination of these techniques can raise the energy reduction potential of the individual techniques. In this paper an overview of current research is given and a general concept is deducted. Based on this concept, a three-step optimization methodology is proposed using (1) offline local prediction, (2) offline global planning and (3) online local scheduling. The paper ends with results of simulations and field tests showing that the methodology is promising.