Energy management system for a residential grid-tied micro-grid

With the national power grid under tremendous pressure, there are enormous pressure exerted on residential electricity consumers to cut-back on electricity consumption to ensure a reliable supply. This has led to residential electricity users wanting to generate their own electricity through solar and wind systems, more formally known as distribution energy resources (DERs). The possibility of DERs currently exists within the centralized power grid, but is currently not well supported by Eskom and local municipalities. There are currently very little widely implemented policies regarding net-metering and feed-in tariff structures amongst Eskom and municipalities. Thus, excess generated energy fed into the grid is used elsewhere without any benefit going to the owner of the DER. By implementing an active energy management system (EMS) alongside the grid integrated system, electricity generated by the DER can be consumed locally by the residential loads. The EMS achieves an electricity consumption reduction of 23.4 % compared to a system with no EMS. Further results show that the EMS compensated system shows a cost saving of R19.17 per day which translates to a reduction of 51.4 % compared to a system with no EMS.