• Energy Research

The significance of electricity cannot be overlooked as all fields of life like material production, health care, educational sector, etc., depend upon it to render consistent and high-quality services, increase productivity and business continuity. To this end, energy operators have experienced a continuous increasing trend in the electricity demand for the past few decades. This may cause many issues like load shedding, increased electricity bills, imbalance between supply and demand, etc. Therefore, forecasting of electricity demand using efficient techniques is crucial for the energy operators to decide about optimal unit commitment and to make electricity dispatch plans. It also helps to avoid wastage as well as the shortage of energy. In this study, a novel forecasting model, known as ELS-net is proposed, which is a combination of an Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) method, multi-model Ensemble Bi Long Short-Term Memory (EBiLSTM) forecasting technique and Support Vector Machine (SVM). In the proposed model, EEMD is used to distinguish between linear and non-linear intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), EBiLSTM is used to forecast the non-linear IMFs and SVM is employed to forecast the linear IMFs. Using separate forecasting techniques for linear and non-linear IMFs decreases the computational complexity of the model. Moreover, SVM requires low computational time as compared to EBiLSTM for linear IMFs. Simulations are performed to examine the effectiveness of the proposed model using two different datasets: New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria (VIC). For performance evaluation, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) are used as performance metrics. From the simulation results, it is obvious that the proposed ELS-net model outperforms the start-of-the-art techniques, such as EMD-BILSTM-SVM, EMD-PSO-GA-SVR, BiLSTM, MLP and SVM in terms of forecasting accuracy and minimum execution time.

The significance of electricity cannot be overlooked as all fields of life like material production, health care, educational sector, etc., depend upon it to render consistent and high-quality services, increase productivity and business continuity. To this end, energy operators have experienced a continuous increasing trend in the electricity demand for the past few decades. This may cause many issues like load shedding, increased electricity bills, imbalance between supply and demand, etc. Therefore, forecasting of electricity demand using efficient techniques is crucial for the energy operators to decide about optimal unit commitment and to make electricity dispatch plans. It also helps to avoid wastage as well as the shortage of energy. In this study, a novel forecasting model, known as ELS-net is proposed, which is a combination of an Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) method, multi-model Ensemble Bi Long Short-Term Memory (EBiLSTM) forecasting technique and Support Vector Machine (SVM). In the proposed model, EEMD is used to distinguish between linear and non-linear intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), EBiLSTM is used to forecast the non-linear IMFs and SVM is employed to forecast the linear IMFs. Using separate forecasting techniques for linear and non-linear IMFs decreases the computational complexity of the model. Moreover, SVM requires low computational time as compared to EBiLSTM for linear IMFs. Simulations are performed to examine the effectiveness of the proposed model using two different datasets: New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria (VIC). For performance evaluation, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) are used as performance metrics. From the simulation results, it is obvious that the proposed ELS-net model outperforms the start-of-the-art techniques, such as EMD-BILSTM-SVM, EMD-PSO-GA-SVR, BiLSTM, MLP and SVM in terms of forecasting accuracy and minimum execution time.

An unprecedented opportunity is presented by smart grid technologies to shift the energy industry into the new era of availability, reliability and efficiency that will contribute to our economic and environmental health. Renewable energy sources play a significant role in making environments greener and generating electricity at a cheaper cost. The cloud/fog computing also contributes to tackling the computationally intensive tasks in a smart grid. This work proposes an energy efficient approach to solve the energy management problem in the fog based environment. We consider a small community that consists of multiple smart homes. A microgrid is installed at each residence for electricity generation. Moreover, it is connected with the fog server to share and store information. Smart energy consumers are able to share the details of excess energy with each other through the fog server. The proposed approach is validated through simulations in terms of cost and imported electricity alleviation.

An unprecedented opportunity is presented by smart grid technologies to shift the energy industry into the new era of availability, reliability and efficiency that will contribute to our economic and environmental health. Renewable energy sources play a significant role in making environments greener and generating electricity at a cheaper cost. The cloud/fog computing also contributes to tackling the computationally intensive tasks in a smart grid. This work proposes an energy efficient approach to solve the energy management problem in the fog based environment. We consider a small community that consists of multiple smart homes. A microgrid is installed at each residence for electricity generation. Moreover, it is connected with the fog server to share and store information. Smart energy consumers are able to share the details of excess energy with each other through the fog server. The proposed approach is validated through simulations in terms of cost and imported electricity alleviation.

In this paper, a demand side management (DSM) scheme is used to make energy utilization more efficient. The DSM scheme encourages the consumer to change energy utilization patterns which benefit the utility. In return, the consumer gets some incentives from the utility. The objectives of the proposed DSM system include: electricity bill reduction, reduced peak to average ratio (PAR), and maximization of consumer comfort. In the proposed system, the electrical devices are scheduled by using elephant herding optimization (EHO) and adaptive cuckoo search (ACS) algorithms. Moreover, a new algorithm called hybrid elephant adaptive cuckoo (HEAC) is proposed which uses the features of both former algorithms. A comparison of these algorithms is also presented in terms of three performance parameters. The HEAC shows better performance as compared to EHO and ACS which is evident from the simulation results. Different electricity tariffs are introduced by the utility to provide incentives to the consumers. A regional based time of use (ToU) tariff is used to make the system effective for different types of regions. Moreover, this enables the consumers to act according to the regional environment. The coordination can play a very important role in cost reduction as well as in consumer comfort maximization. The coordination is incorporated among the electrical devices by using cooperative game theory (GT) and dynamic programming (DP). Extensive simulations are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of electricity utilization cost, PAR reduction, and consumer comfort maximization.

In this paper, a demand side management (DSM) scheme is used to make energy utilization more efficient. The DSM scheme encourages the consumer to change energy utilization patterns which benefit the utility. In return, the consumer gets some incentives from the utility. The objectives of the proposed DSM system include: electricity bill reduction, reduced peak to average ratio (PAR), and maximization of consumer comfort. In the proposed system, the electrical devices are scheduled by using elephant herding optimization (EHO) and adaptive cuckoo search (ACS) algorithms. Moreover, a new algorithm called hybrid elephant adaptive cuckoo (HEAC) is proposed which uses the features of both former algorithms. A comparison of these algorithms is also presented in terms of three performance parameters. The HEAC shows better performance as compared to EHO and ACS which is evident from the simulation results. Different electricity tariffs are introduced by the utility to provide incentives to the consumers. A regional based time of use (ToU) tariff is used to make the system effective for different types of regions. Moreover, this enables the consumers to act according to the regional environment. The coordination can play a very important role in cost reduction as well as in consumer comfort maximization. The coordination is incorporated among the electrical devices by using cooperative game theory (GT) and dynamic programming (DP). Extensive simulations are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of electricity utilization cost, PAR reduction, and consumer comfort maximization.

Multi-microgrid (MMG) system is a new method that concurrently incorporates different types of distributed energy resources, energy storage systems and demand responses to provide reliable and independent electricity for the community. However, MMG system faces the problems of management, real-time economic operations and controls. Therefore, this study proposes an energy management system (EMS) that turns an infinite number of MMGs into a coherence and efficient system, where each MMG can achieve its goals and perspectives. The proposed EMS employs a cooperative game to achieve efficient coordination and operations of the MMG system and also ensures a fair energy cost allocation among members in the coalition. This study considers the energy cost allocation problem when the number of members in the coalition grows exponentially. The energy cost allocation problem is solved using a column generation algorithm. The proposed model includes energy storage systems, demand loads, real-time electricity prices and renewable energy. The estimate of the daily operating cost of the MMG using a proposed deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is analyzed in this study. An optimal scheduling policy to optimize the total daily operating cost of MMG is also proposed. Besides, other existing optimal scheduling policies, such as approximate dynamic programming (ADP), model prediction control (MPC), and greedy policy are considered for the comparison. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model, the real-time electricity prices of the electric reliability council of Texas are used. Simulation results show that each MMG can achieve energy cost savings through a coalition of MMG. Moreover, the proposed optimal policy method achieves MG's daily operating cost reduction up to 87.86% as compared to 79.52% for the MPC method, 73.94% for the greedy policy method and 79.42% for ADP method.