Home load management in a residential energy hub

• We model a multi carrier energy home with residential energy hub framework.
• An optimization problem is proposed to manage home load in the hub.
• Home load management (HLM) leads to lower customer payment cost.
• Home electrical demand shifts to low tariff and low demand hours by applying HLM.

One way of more efficiently utilizing the existing gas and electrical infrastructures is to consider them as one integrated system in planning and operation of energy systems. The energy hub framework is adopted to determine a modeling procedure for such multi carrier energy systems. This paper presents a residential energy hub model for a smart home. A residential combined heat and power (CHP) as a cogeneration technology, and a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle are employed in the model. Operation of the hub is optimized through a proposed optimization-based formulation. The objective is to minimize customer payment cost. Solving the problem determines how much of each energy carrier the hubs should consume and how they should be converted in order to meet the load at hub's outputs. Since home load management (HLM) plays a key role in realizing household demand response programs, performing HLM in the proposed residential energy hub model is also studied in this paper. To do this, the optimization problem is extended by considering different operational constraints of the responsive appliances determined by the customer. The proposed optimization-based formulation is applied to a home to deeply study the different aspects of the propounded method.