Residential demand response with low cost smart load controllers

This paper presents a demand response (DR) paradigm, in which smart energy controllers enable the participation of smart homes in demand response programs. The demand side management strategy used is load shifting. The smart home controller is able to manage the residential electrical installation, and reshapes the demand profile through shifting the operation of flexible loads according to the specific demand response program incentives and the consumer's needs. A demand response aggregator may coordinate the operation of a number of smart consumers by exchanging control and other information objects with the smart energy controllers. Various types of flexible loads are considered and Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is used in order to optimize both the aggregator and smart consumer operation under various constraints. Finally, a low cost controller prototype responsible for the residential level MILP optimization is designed and tested in a real time environment suitable for demand response applications.