Optimal Scheduling of Residential Home Appliances by Considering Energy Storage and Stochastically Modelled Photovoltaics in a Grid Exchange Environment Using Hybrid Grey Wolf Genetic Algorithm Optimizer

The transformation of a conventional power system to a smart grid has been underway over the last few decades. A smart grid provides opportunities to integrate smart homes with renewable energy resources (RERs). Moreover, it encourages the residential consumers to regulate their home energy consumption in an effective way that suits their lifestyle and it also helps to preserve the environment. Keeping in mind the techno-economic reasons for household energy management, active participation of consumers in grid operations is necessary for peak reduction, valley filling, strategic load conservation, and growth. In this context, this paper presents an efficient home energy management system (HEMS) for consumer appliance scheduling in the presence of an energy storage system and photovoltaic generation with the intention to reduce the energy consumption cost determined by the service provider. To study the benefits of a home-to-grid (H2G) energy exchange in HEMS, photovoltaic generation is stochastically modelled by considering an energy storage system. The prime consideration of this paper is to propose a hybrid optimization approach based on heuristic techniques, grey wolf optimization, and a genetic algorithm termed a hybrid grey wolf genetic algorithm to model HEMS for residential consumers with the objectives to reduce energy consumption cost and the peak-to-average ratio. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated through simulations performed for a residential consumer with several domestic appliances and their scheduling preferences by considering real-time pricing and critical peak-pricing tariff signals. Results related to the reduction in the peak-to-average ratio and energy cost demonstrate that the proposed hybrid optimization technique performs well in comparison with different meta-heuristic techniques available in the literature. The findings of the proposed methodology can further be used to calculate the impact of different demand response signals on the operation and reliability of a power system.