A Fuzzy logic enabled demand side management system for residential electrical energy control

Abstract

Globally, energy management has become a challenge and a concern due to rapid increase of demand and energy security. Among the five sectors, residential sector, in South Africa, is the second in electricity consumption and is responsible of about 17% of the total generated capacity with high contribution during peak demand. In order to mitigate this increase, policy and legislations have been implemented. Apart from the policy documents introduced, utilities have further introduced the demand side management (DSM) initiatives such as demand response (incentive based and price based) to encourage the load reduction during peak hours. Manually managing peak hour consumption is a tedious process. Also, it is difficult for the users to manually respond to the offered incentives and price based tariffs. It is within the settings of the problem that this dissertation seeks to enhance the residential electricity consumption by scheduling the household appliances in line with the response to the time of use (ToU) tariffs. Further, the dissertation seeks to develop a system that will manage the amount of electricity as desired by the consumer for the given a timeframe by integrating the optimisation technique to make the intelligent decisions that link ToU with residential electrical energy consumption. This results in “A fuzzy logic enabled demand side management system for residential electrical energy control”. The system simulation was developed in LabVIEW VI 2019. The simulation assisted in implementation and verification of different scenarios aimed in this study such as time of use tariffs, load consumption and remaining daily electricity limit. Furthermore, the model was developed to verify the fuzzy ruling in real time control for 24 hours with the calculated daily electricity limit. The collected results showed that the model was able to control the residential load consumption and enhance the consumption by scheduling the house hold appliances considering the time of use tariff and available amount of electricity.