Energy cost optimization through load shifting in a photovoltaic energy-sharing household community

Home energy management systems are essential for the optimization of resources in complex demand scheduling problems that require energy efficiency in homes. This can be achieved through the use of Renewable Electricity Sources (RES), for cleaner and more sustainable energy generation, as well as participation in Demand Response (DR) programs, for lower energy prices. The problem becomes more complex when it is considered a community of households. This paper aims to address individual and community household participation in DR programs and RES sharing while considering constraints imposed on the operation schedule of appliances, through load shifting optimization. For that, a Genetic Algorithm is proposed, implemented, and validated, which focuses on minimizing energy costs. It takes into account dynamic pricing, distributed generation, and household community energy sharing. Using real household workload data, two case studies are presented, one for the cost optimization of an individual household and another for a photovoltaic energy-sharing household community containing twenty houses. Both case studies represent five days of scheduling, where each house can have up to five appliances able to shift. The business as usual costs are 16.74 EUR and 269.99 EUR for the individual and community case studies, respectively. Results show improvements of up to 24.3% (12.67 EUR in the optimized schedule, 4.07 EUR in savings) for the individual case study and 11.8% (238.21 EUR in the optimized schedule, 31.78 EUR in savings) for the household community. In a community, households can expect cost reductions of 1.5%–26.8% when compared to individual scheduling.