Smart Residential Load Simulator for Energy Management in Smart Grids

This paper describes the development of a freeware smart residential load simulator to facilitate the study of residential energy management systems in smart grids. The proposed tool is based on MATLAB-Simulink-GUIDE toolboxes and provides a complete set of user-friendly graphical interfaces to properly model and study smart thermostats, air conditioners, furnaces, water heaters, stoves, dishwashers, cloth washers, dryers, lights, pool pumps, and refrigerators, whose models are validated with actual measurements. Wind and solar power generation as well as battery sources are also modeled, and the impact of different variables, such as ambient temperature and household activity levels, which considerably contribute to energy consumption, are considered. The proposed simulator allows modeling of appliances to obtain their power demand profiles, thus helping to determine their contribution to peak demand, and allowing the calculation of their individual and total energy consumption and costs. In addition, the value and impact of generated power by residential sources can be determined for a 24-h horizon. This freeware platform is a useful tool for researchers and educators to validate and demonstrate models for energy management and optimization, and can also be used by residential customers to model and understand energy consumption profiles in households. Some simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance and application of the proposed simulator.