New consumer-dependent energy management system to reduce cost and carbon impact in smart buildings

Buildings represent one of the most important energy consumers (about 40% and 55% of total U.S. and European energy consumption, respectively) and are regarded as non-negligible greenhouse gases emitters (39% of total greenhouse gases emission in U.S.). Hence, it becomes crucial to control buildings energy consumption in order to preserve energy resources and reduce greenhouse gases. For this reason, we propose in this paper a real time Consumer-Dependent Energy Management System (CD-EMS) in MicroGrids (i.e. a restricted form of the power grid) for smart buildings. The main new idea is to find a trade-off between the energy cost, either renewable or non-renewable, and its carbon impact. The other innovation is to transform the building manager to a Consum-Actor who participates directly on reducing greenhouse gas emission by fixing a consumer's acceptability margin that allows buying renewable energy, even if it is a little more expensive than non-renewable one. CD-EMS offers the best compromise between decreasing energy cost and reducing gas emissions. The problem is modeled as a linear program, resolved by Matlab, and implemented in a small-scale datacenter building prototype. The obtained results show a noticeable improvement in terms of cost and carbon impact where we prove that our system is able to reduce cost until 7.3%, and CO2 emission until 55.7%.