Optimal electrification of off-grid smart homes considering flexible demand and vehicle-to-home capabilities

Abstract

The emergence of novel demand-side management strategies is provoking that residential consumers cannot be longer categorized as inflexible loads. In that sense, new paradigms such as flexible demand and vehicle-to-home capabilities have appeared on pursuing a more efficient management of the different domestic assets such as smart appliances, small renewable generators and storage facilities. Consideration of such kind of management strategies plays a vital role on designing stages of electrifications systems for isolated homes. In this regard, a proper evaluation of possible demand-side capabilities enables a more accurate evaluation of the electrification project. This paper tackles this issue by developing a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation for optimal planning of electrification systems for off-grid dwellings. The developed framework allows to incorporate and analyse advanced demand-side strategies such as deferrable loads and vehicle-to-home processes by evaluating different project costs over various time horizons. The proposed approach is applied to a benchmark off-grid residential case study and various results are provided and analysed. As the most relevant result, it is worth remarking that total project cost can be reduced by ~21.2% and ~25.73% by considering flexible demand and vehicle-to-home capabilities, respectively. Nevertheless, the highest monetary savings were achieved when both strategies are jointly adopted, reducing the total project cost up to ~41.5%. The reported results demonstrate the importance of considering the different demand-side strategies on planning stages of electrification systems for off-grid dwellings.