Investigating the value of making hourly operational decisions for residential distributed energy resources

We investigate the value of making hourly operational decisions for residential distributed energy resources such as interruptible and shiftable appliances and energy storage. The value is determined by computing the savings achieved when making hourly decisions and comparing it to the savings achieved when making day-ahead decisions. These decisions, or schedules, are formulated considering the uncertainties in energy service demand and status of dynamic peak pricing. The robust schedules are generated using an energy service decision support tool we have presented in an earlier paper. We used the tool to formulate day-ahead schedules by maximizing the expected net benefit of the consumer over an optimal set of scenarios that represents the range of uncertainty, and the results were presented in another paper. In this paper, we used the tool to implement hour-by-hour decision-making by applying the rolling horizon model to the optimal scenario set approach. Based on the scenarios we simulated, the average savings is not significant enough to favor it over day-ahead scheduling. The day-ahead schedules, therefore, are already robust and improving it by making hourly decisions savings may not be enough to recover the expenses for the effort and equipment required to support real-time decision-making.