Advanced Smart House with an electric vehicle

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, many people have been worried about power shortages in Japan. There has been more focuses to the save electricity at home. A method is very important that can reduce the energy requirement without any trouble to the home people. The spread of PV (Photovoltaic) will be expanded by the surplus power buy back institution, and Smart House with HEMS is expected to save the electricity. Therefore, studies and verification tests of a smart house are very effective. The stand-alone capability in the conventional PV system does not work well in a natural disaster. The reason is that the conventional stand-alone capability is needed to switch by manual when switching to the stand-alone mode and it is only able to supply power to the limited plugs. In addition, transferring stand-alone mode to the grid-connected mode is needed to switch by manually. It needs an effective and a safe stand-alone capability of PV system at home that can ensure power stability during the disaster like the typhoons and earthquakes. This paper describes a disaster prevention and energy management system for a smart house. The effectiveness of the proposed smart house is verified by computer simulations on Matlab/SimPower systems^® environment.