A Data-driven Home Energy Management System for Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

This work develops a home energy management system (HEMS) for regions where load shedding exists. The hardware of HEMS is mainly made from second-life materials, hence it is cheap enough for the low-income families to use. A cloud platform is developed to remotely communicate and manage the battery controlled by the HEMS. A multi-objective optimisation model is proposed to consider the trade-off between reliability improvement and bill reduction in places with time-of-use (TOU) pricing. Case studies are conducted through a simulation approach considering scheduled and unscheduled load shedding. The result shows that the HEMS can provide essential power supply during load shedding periods and reduce customers’ electricity bills. The feasibility of the product has been tested in Botswana through a project with grant support from Innovate UK, EMBOSSA.