1. The Energy Box: Locally Automated Control of Residential Energy Usage
Daniel Livengood
(MIT PhD Student)
Co-author of corresponding paper in Service Science journal. Received B.S. and M.S. in Systems Science and Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. Main research interest: responsive electricity demand. .
The Energy Box: Locally Automated Control of Residential Energy Usage
Supervisors: Prof. Richard Larson (MIT), Prof. Jim Kirtley (MIT) and Prof. Steve Graves (MIT)
MIT-Portugal associated research project: Smart Energy Networks
Research team: Prof. Richard Larson, Woei Ling Leow, Joana Abreu
Objectives of the PhD
Assumptions: Envisioning an electric grid with time-varying pricing (changing hourly or every 5 minutes) and homes with addressable and controllable appliances, storage devices, and distributed generation sources
Hypothesis: Coordinated, automated control of a home’s usage, storage, and selling of electricity will manage a homeowner’s electricity consumption in response to stochastic and uncertain future conditions better than uncoordinated, ‘one-appliance-at-a-time’ control
Motivation: Benefits to network operator (e.g. better grid control) and homeowner (e.g. cost savings), via companies providing energy services
Work plan
Completed:
Built a dynamic programming (DP) structure for automated decision making
Tested DP structure on an illustrative set of appliances and devices (see results below)
Next Steps
Expand the DP structure to use an approximate dynamic programming structure to support the inclusion of more appliances and devices
Preliminary Results
Initial 30-day simulation illustrates benefits of coordinated control over uncoordinated, ‘one-appliance-at-a-time’ control (see table)
For further discussion of method and results, please see the corresponding paper:
Livengood and Larson: The Energy Box: Locally Automated Optimal Control of Residential Electricity Usage Service Science 1(1), pp. 1-16, © 2009 SSG
Com o apoio / with support of: