Energy management for households with solar assisted thermal load considering renewable energy and price uncertainty

In this paper, we investigate the energy scheduling problem for a household equipped with a solar assisted heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, and water heating system in the real-time pricing environment. Our objective is to minimize the electricity cost while maintaining user's thermal comfort requirements. We consider different types of loads with different characteristics, detailed modeling of thermal dynamics, and uncertainty in electricity price and solar energy. The advantage of the proposed design lies in the exploitation of the solar assisted thermal system that can flexibly utilize the energy from the solar source or from the grid during low-price periods to support the home hot water demand, user thermal indoor temperature preference while reducing the electricity cost. We present numerical results to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed design. Specifically, we show that the proposed design can achieve significant cost saving, allow flexible tradeoff between user comfort tolerance and electricity cost reduction, and efficiently adjust the electricity consumption load profile. We also analyze the influence of solar assisted thermal system factors such as the water tank temperature limit, solar collector size, and weather condition on the achievable cost.