An integrated residential smart home energy management system in Uganda.

Abstract

A Home Energy Management (HEM) system plays a crucial role in realizing residential Demand Response programs in the smart grid environment. It provides a homeowner the ability to automatically perform smart load controls based on utility signals, customers preference and load priority. The HEMs communication time delay to perform load control is analyzed, along with its residual energy consumption. The main aim is to design how each load performs when being controlled by the HEM unit and measure electrical measurements for the different loads. Demand response (DR) is defined as changes in electricity use by demand-side resources from their normal consumption patterns in response to changes in the price of electricity. HEM system comprises an HEM unit that provides monitoring and control functionalities for a homeowner, and load controllers that gather electrical consumption data from selected appliances and perform local control based on command signals from the HEM system. A gateway, such as a smart meter, can be used to provide an interface between a utility and the data base for the electrical consumption is maintained and by use of an LCD screen that displays all the readings of different loads.