Energy cost management of domestic customers in real-time electricity pricing environments

This paper addresses the problem of electricity and thermal cost management for a domestic customer who installed a combined heat and power (CHP) in his/her house. Real-time electricity prices provide consumers the opportunity to respond to the price changes and hence, reduce their electricity bills. CHP systems also provide home owners the opportunity to reduce their total energy costs. Automatic home load control systems by responding to real-time electricity prices and by controlling CHP units can help consumers to simply manage their usage profile more efficiently. This paper proposes an optimization problem for automatic home load controllers to schedule the operation period of various home appliances and to control the production of their CHP unit such that the expected energy payment is minimized. The proposed formulation is of a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) format which can be easily solved via commercially available software packages. Effectiveness of the developed formulation is demonstrated by applying to a typical house.