Consumer energy portal and home energy management system for smart grid applications

This paper presents a web-based consumer energy portal (CEP) and home energy management system (HEMS) developed in Laboratory for Clean Energy Research (LaCER), School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering in Nanyang Technological University (NTU). The CEP developed will be deployed in NTU campus to provide home users at staff quarters with improved energy services such as electricity billing, outage detection and notification, metering information and energy analysis via websites, distributed generation (DG) aggregation for market participation, home energy management system (HEMS), Time of Use (ToU) pricing scheme selection and demand response management (DRM). A ZigBee based HEMS has been developed with NI-LabVIEW software to take advantage of the CEP. With the CEP and HEMS, home users can manage their energy consumption wisely based on ToU pricing and increase in energy efficiency with the help of the DRM function. Simulation studies were done with the historical data collected from the smart meters installed at staff quarters to show the impact of implementing load shifting technique and incorporating distributed energy resources (DERs) such as Solar Photovoltaic (PV) system and battery storage system (BESS) for noncontestable consumers in NTU.