Design and Implementation of an Energy Management System with Appliance Scheduling for a Solar Home Based on a Programmable Logic Controller

This article presents the development of a Solar Home Energy Management System (SHEMS). The proposed SHEMS architecture aims to optimize the use of locally generated photovoltaic electricity to provide the home's energy requirements. Loads planning has been added to the energy flow management. An S7-1200 Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) is used to implement the energy management algorithm. Several PV production and load consumption scenarios were considered to evaluate the SHEMS. The results show that optimal load scheduling can achieve advantageous energy cost savings for the owners by satisfying the demand directly from the PV generator and peak shaving allows for net-work relief. Depending on the season, managing loads improves selfconsumption rates by 1% to 11% and lowers summer peak consumption by about 1.4kWh/d.