A Home Energy Router and Energy Management Strategy for AC/DC Hybrid Sources and Consumers

Green smart home technologies are expected to comprise a significant portion in the future Energy Internet (EI) with the introduction of new home appliances and the integration of distributed energies. As the key interface equipment to undertake power conversion, energy integration and management, energy router plays a significant role in EI. In this way, a home energy router and energy management strategy for AC/DC hybrid sources and consumers is proposed in this paper. The architecture, communication system and energy management are introduced and discussed. The proposed home energy router could provide six kinds of interfaces. Each interface can realize the plug-and-play of sources and consumers. The energy flow will autonomously choose the optimized path between energy sources and consumers by using the home energy management system. As sources and consumers in the proposed architecture could be in different AC or DC forms, and voltage levels or qualities, more flexible path selection could be provided for power supply compared to traditional configuration. By using the distributed hierarchical energy management, energy routing could be achieved to obtain different functions such as peak load shifting, peak load shaving, smoothing power fluctuation and islanded operation, electricity plan following, etc. The proposed home energy router could also be improved and applied to the smart buildings and other extensive occasions.