A Novel Dynamic Load Scheduling and Peak Shaving Control Scheme in Community Home Energy Management System Based Microgrids

Load scheduling and peak demand shaving are two critical aspects of the utility grid operation that help both the grid operators as well as end-users. This paper proposes a two-stage community home energy management system for microgrids. The first stage deals with the dynamic clustered community load scheduling scheme. Comparatively flatter power demand was attained using particle swarm optimization (PSO) incorporating user-defined constraints. The new arising or remaining peaks as a consequence of consumer constraints are catered to in the second stage. The second stage proposes a rule-based peak shaving management method for the photovoltaic (PV) systems that are connected to the grid and the battery energy storage systems. The proposed technique determines the dynamic demand and feed-in limits based on the estimations of the upcoming day's load demand and PV power profiles. Also, the study presents an optimal rule-based management technique for peak shaving of utility grid power that sets the charge/discharge day ahead schedules of the battery. For peak energy minimization, PSO is used to calculate the optimal inputs needed for implementing the appropriate rule-based management strategy. MATLAB is used to test the proposed method for different PV power and load demand patterns, thus, achieving an average improvement of 8.5%.