Profit enhancement through optimized operation of photovoltaic systems with elastic demand

Motivated by the decreasing costs of distributed energy resources and energy storage technologies, the increasing costs of electricity for households and the decreasing benefits of feed-in tariff, new strategies for power management inside a house are required. The two-way flow of information and power in smart grid creates new opportunities, services and applications in the next generation power grid. Both system operators and normal households can benefit from this paradigm, which has the potential to change not only how energy will be produced but also how energy will be consumed. In this paper we extend our previous approach aiming to enhance the profit of a privately owned Photovoltaic (PV) system such that it considers load elasticity and limitations on charging and discharging of batteries. The proposed method increases the profit through exploiting demand and supply forecasts, day-ahead price and demand elasticity. Each house finds periodically the optimal strategy to follow based on the results of solving a discrete optimization problem which takes into consideration different system parameters and constraints. The proposed power management controller is suitable to be applied in the realtime operation of a typical house. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides more savings compared to a standard approach across a range of different scenarios and system constraints. The results show that a typical house can save up to 300 €/year when applying optimized power management compared to a standard approach.