Carbon emission savings with a renewable energy supplied smart home operation

Recently, ideas like smart cities, smart buildings/homes has been widely used under smart grid concept, which is a new research area that combines power systems and information technology (IT). The basic building block of the smart grid can be considered as “smart home”. Smart grid infrastructure with smart homes will allow to monitor electrical demand of a city or a residential customer and to achieve better utilization of existing grid through the use of streaming demand data. In addition, it will be easier to integrate renewable energy sources into existing grid. Experimental demonstrations are important for promoting smart grid concept. Thus, a renewable energy supplied smart home project with a budget of $0.5 million has been completed at Yıldız Technical University (YTU), Istanbul, Turkey. This paper first introduces the constructed smart home in detail. Then, the benefit of smart home operation on carbon emission reduction with appliance control through smart plugs is analysed by a simulation study in Matlab/Simulink.