How Smart Homes will Impact Smart Energy Grids
What is the correlation between a smart home and a smart grid? What impact will the Smart Grid have on your smart home? Although it won't appear to change much, a lot will be going on in the background. New hardware, appliances, and software are already readily available in many American cities, utilizing cutting-edge Smart System technology to reduce energy use, look for the best deals, and support the effective and efficient operation of our electric grid.
The interaction between grid operators, utilities, and you is a crucial component that enables all of the emergent Smart Grid technologies to work together. You can program computerized controls in your home and appliances to react to signals from your energy supplier to reduce your energy consumption during periods of peak demand or even to move some of your energy use to periods when power is more affordable in price.
Energy Management System and Smart Meters
The Smart Grid interface between you and your energy supplier is provided via smart meters. These digital meters are installed instead of your old mechanical meter and enable complicated and automated information transfers between your home and your energy supplier. Smart meters, for instance, will transmit information from your energy supplier that can assist you in lowering your energy expenses. Additionally, smart meters give utilities more knowledge about the amount of electricity being utilized in their service areas.
A home energy management system (EMS) can be used to process the energy data going into and leaving your home from your smart meter, allowing you to view it on your computer or handheld device in an understandable format. You can track your energy consumption in great detail with a home EMS to improve energy conservation. For instance, by just keeping an eye on your EMS while turning various appliances and other gadgets on and off, you may observe the energy impact of those appliances.
You can set up an EMS to automatically consume power during times when prices are lowest while simultaneously monitoring real-time information and pricing signals from your utility. Aside from avoiding peak demand periods and contributing to the local energy load balance, you can select settings that will force certain appliances and pieces of equipment to shut off automatically when a high demand may cause the risk of an outage. This will help avoid blackouts. Your utility may offer financial rewards for this.
Smart Devices
Many of the equipment in your smart home will be linked together, enabling you to access and control them using your EMS. When you're preparing to leave work, you can use an EMS to turn on your heater or air conditioner, or you can monitor the energy consumption of particular equipment or appliances, such as your pool pump, or see how much energy you saved by switching to an energy-saving dishwasher.
Additionally, smart appliances will be able to react to signals from your energy supplier to stop using energy in periods of peak demand. It works more intelligently than a simple on/off switch. A smart air conditioner might, for instance, slightly lengthen its cycle time to lessen its strain on the grid; while this would go unnoticed to you, thousands of air conditioners operating similarly might dramatically lessen the demand on the electrical system. Similar to how a smart dishwasher may delay starting until off-peak hours, a smart refrigerator could postpone its defrost cycle.
These smart appliances will, of course, have consumer controls that can, if necessary, override the automatic settings. You will be able to run your dishwasher as soon as you need to, regardless of the cost of electricity.
Home Power Generation Systems
With the help of the Smart Grid and its control systems and smart meters, it will be possible to connect all of these small power generation systems to the grid in an efficient manner, provide utilities and owners with information about how they are operating, and determine how much surplus energy is being fed back into the grid as opposed to being used locally. The ability for your neighborhood to use your solar array—and your neighbor's—to keep the lights on even if there is no electricity from a utility is one probable feature of the Smart Grid. In a process known as "islanding," a residence will be able to use "distributed resources" such as nearby solar panels, small hydropower, and wind projects to generate electricity until utility personnel can bring the system right back.