A Survey of Home Energy Management Systems in Future Smart Grid Communications

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews home energy management systems within smart grids, highlighting their roles in enhancing efficiency, reducing peak demand, and integrating new pricing schemes and distributed energy resources.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of HEM architectures, discusses challenges in implementation, and emphasizes their importance in future smart grid communications.

Findings

HEM improves electricity efficiency and savings.

Various pricing schemes support smart grid integration.

Challenges include architecture implementation and coordination.

Abstract

In this paper we present a systematic review of various home energy management (HEM) schemes. Employment of home energy management programs will make the electricity consumption smarter and more efficient. Advantages of HEM include, increased savings for consumers as well as utilities, reduced peak to average ratio (PAR) and peak demand. Where there are numerous applications of smart grid technologies, home energy management is probably the most important one to be addressed. Utilities across the globe have taken various steps for efficient consumption of electricity. New pricing schemes like, Real Time Pricing (RTP), Time of Use (ToU), Inclining Block Rates (IBR), Critical Peak Pricing (CPP) etc, have been proposed for smart grid. Distributed Energy Resources (DER) (local generation) and/or home appliances coordination along with different tariff schemes lead towards efficient consumption of electricity. This work also discusses a HEM systems general architecture and various challenges in implementation of this architecture in smart grid.