Date of Award

6-13-2019

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2019

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Maryam Khanbaghi

Abstract

Consumers tend to lack an understanding of the way that their electricity is priced and the way that their energy consumption impacts utility operations. In this paper, we create a program and hardware implementation that uses day-before hourly electricity pricing and efficiency modes aiming to better distribute the user’s power consumption, control the user’s peak power consumption, shave peaks at the hours where electricity costs the most, as well as reduce the user’s monthly electricity bill. Our program achieves this by optimizing the operation time of appliances such as the washer, dryer, dishwasher, HVAC, and electric vehicle charging and by managing the operation of a battery to supplement the home’s load. Additionally, it shows the user’s power consumption as a way of educating the user about utility pricing and their power consumption. Our program and hardware implementation succeeded in reducing a monthly electricity bill for our worst-case heavy-use day by 58.27%. The way that electricity is priced needs to be changed in order to reward people for using electricity at alternate times of the day and to discourage people from contributing to the load demand.

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