A Tool for Modeling and Optimization of Residential Electricity Consumption

Today's households face a huge variety of electricity consuming devices on the one hand, and increasing electricity prices and increased awareness for environmental sustainability on the other hand. Fluctuating electricity tariffs currently evaluated by electricity suppliers have the potential to make it even more com-plex for the electricity consumer to keep costs low. We want to help the consumer to manage this com-plexity and increase her or his awareness for the electricity consumption of the household's devices. Therefore, we have developed a tool which allows to model and simulate the set of electricity consuming devices, their loads, and electricity tariffs. It is possible to create schedules for the usage of devices, calcu-late the resulting load curve and automatically optimize the schedule based on fluctuating power tariffs while paying attention to customer definable constraints. Furthermore, the tool allows to compare modeled and metered load curves, which is especially useful to evaluate correctness and completeness of the house-hold's model. To decrease the modeling effort, the tool can access libraries of predefined devices and tar-iffs via the Internet. 1