Energy Management Design for Smart Homes Using Green Technology

With today's drastic increase in energy demand, it becomes more and more important to use alternative green technologies. Solar, wind, and hydroelectricity are popular choices, because they are abundant and cause low pollution. One big challenge however is how to manage these new energy resources within the traditional electricity grid. Today's smart home technologies and devices offer a variety of house appliances with embedded sensors. Through Internet websites or ad hoc applications, customers are able to monitor household appliances and receive data from the sensors in real time. However, users are not suggested what measures to take to save energy and money. This paper discusses the design of a new power management system. A new hardware design is developed to implement the proposed management energy solution. The new design consists of a bidirectional DC-DC converter and a battery charger/discharger circuit. By adopting this approach for smart grid systems, we provide a management solution to optimized energy distribution and usage.