Optimal Energy Scheduling for Residential Smart Grid with Centralized Renewable Energy Source

Future smart grids will be featured by flexible supply-demand management and great penetration of renewable energy to enable efficient and economical grid operations. While the renewable energy offers a cheaper and cleaner energy supply, it introduces supply uncertainty due to the volatility of renewable source. It is therefore of practical importance to investigate the optimal exploitation of renewable energy based on the supply-demand framework of future smart grids, where the energy-providers (or the energy-users) adaptively adjust their energy-provisioning (or energy-demands) according to some system state information that takes into account the volatility of renewable energy. Specifically, we consider cost-efficient energy scheduling for residential smart grids equipped with a centralized renewable energy source. Our scheduling problem aims at: 1) quantifying the optimal utilization of renewable energy that achieves the tradeoff between the system-wide benefit from exploiting the renewable energy and the associated cost due to its volatility; and 2) evaluating how the volatility of renewable energy influences its optimal exploitation. We also propose computationally efficient and distributed algorithms to determine the optimal exploitation of renewable energy as well as the associated energy scheduling decisions.