A Review of Time-of-Use Pricing Mechanisms and Residential Demand Response Strategies in Smart Grid Environments
TL;DR
This paper systematically examines residential load structures and sources of flexibility (smart appliances, home energy management systems (HEMS), electric vehicle charging loads, and distributed photovoltaics and energy storage), and suggests feasible measures like load shifting, changing the priorities of energy-use, and synchronous operation of the stores.
Abstract
As advanced metering infrastructure, communication networks, and distributed energy resources rapidly evolve, the traditional model of a one-way supply electricity system is changing to a smart grid based on information and energy bidirectional interaction. Being a standard price-based demand-side control tool, time-of-use (TOU) pricing transmits the amount of supply-demand stress and marginal cost data by differentiation of peak-valley charges, cueing the temporal redistribution of dispatchable residential loads. By so doing, it can trim peak demand, fill valleys, reduce peak pressure on distribution systems, and enhance the use of generation, transmission, and distribution resources. Based on the discussion of smart grids and TOU pricing, this paper systematically examines residential load structures and sources of flexibility (smart appliances, home energy management systems (HEMS), electric vehicle charging loads, and distributed photovoltaics and energy storage). It also suggests feasible measures like load shifting, changing the priorities of energy-use, and synchronous operation of the stores, and addresses the potential advantages of same in terms of reducing electricity expenses, smoothing load curves, and increasing the consumption of renewable energy sources, and also raising some of the concerns that have to be addressed in large-scale practice, including user comfort limits, equipment interoperability, and communication security.