A strategy for residential demand response management in modern electricity markets

The innovations in power electronics and the introduction of the advance high-speed information and communication technologies and sophisticated control has made the load demand of the power system more flexible and easily controllable in a smart grid paradigm. In this paper, a demand response (DR) management strategy is presented which modifies the customer load based upon the price of electricity provided by the utility company in order to decrease the electricity bill. The problem is modeled by considering the uncontrollable and controllable residential load appliances and different types of electric vehicles (EVs) and their shifting windows constraints. The optimization problem is solved using a well known optimization technique, i.e., particle swarm optimization with the aim of minimization of the cost of electricity paid by customer by shifting the loads to less pricing hours and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) operation of electric vehicles (EVs) to high pricing hours. A comparison based upon the electricity bill is presented for four scenarios, 1) system without DR strategy, 2) system with DR program that optimizes the load shift, 3) system with DR program that optimizes V2G operation only without shifting the load, and 4) system with DR program that shifts the load and optimizes V2G operation as well. It is shown that the DR strategy that optimizes the load shift and V2G operation is economical.