Internet of things and cloud computing-based energy management system for demand side management in smart grid

A smart grid is an electricity network, which deals with electronic power conditioning and control of production, transmission, and distribution of electrical power by employing digital communication technologies to monitor and manage local changes in electricity usage. In the traditional power grid, energy consumers remain oblivious to their power consumption patterns, resulting in wasted energy as well as money. This issue is severely pronounced in the developing countries where there is a huge gap between demand and supply, resulting in frequent power outages and load-shedding. For electrical energy savings, the smart grid employs demand side management (DSM), which refers to adaptation in consumer's demand for energy through various approaches such as financial incentives and awareness. The DSM in future smart grid must exploit automated energy management systems (EMS) built upon the state-of-the-art technologies such as the internet of things (IoT) and cloud and/or fog computing. In this paper, we present the architecture framework, design, and implementation of an IoT and cloud computing-based EMS, which generates load profile of consumer to be accessed remotely by utility company or by the consumer. The consumers' load profiles enable utility companies to regulate and disseminate their incentives and incite the consumers to adapt their energy consumption. Our designed EMS is implemented on a Project Circuit Board (PCB) to be easily installed at the consumer premises where it performs the following tasks: (a) monitors energy consumption of electrical appliances by means of our designed current and voltage sensors, (b) uploads sensed data to Google Firebase cloud over many-to-many IoT communication protocol Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) where consumer's load profile is generated, which can be accessed via a web portal. These load profiles serve as input for implementing the various DSM approaches. Our results demonstrate generated load profiles of consumer load in terms of current, voltage, energy, and power accessible via a web portal.