Home Energy Router for smart consumer grids

Sustainable energy and energy harvesting has become a hot research area due to the depleting fossil energy resources and the need for lower carbon emissions. Nowadays, most appliances and short-term or small storage devices usually work on DC power and many renewable/sustainable energy sources also generate DC power. Therefore, there are several sophisticated power converters required to integrate DC appliances, sources and storage within the convectional AC grid, which may increase the overall grid installation cost and decrease the grid reliability. For this reason, the DC powered microgrid is gaining popularity due to reduced complexity, low energy losses and the small number of converters required. For instance, on-site generation and battery storage can be directly integrated in DC microgrid and solely DC-DC converter required to power-up DC appliances. However, existing infrastructure is based on AC distribution and few critical domestic appliances required AC power for normal operation. In this paper, we propose distinctive model to accommodate AC/DC powered load, sources and storage within the DC microgrid without any additional power converter, known as HER (Home Energy Router).