1. Introduction

Until recent times, peak-hour electrical demand and supply were usually controlled by human-interface-based load control approach. The strategy required cooperation of the consumers to calculate and analyze their consumption in peak hours to reduce their consumption and eventually electricity costs. Although this strategy was simpler and cheaper for utility companies, the method was not effective in most of the cases as usually consumers lacked knowledge about the consumption of their electrical appliances. Therefore, changing the

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

perspective to smart usage of electrical power within the limitation, a new avenue called demand response programs (hereafter, DRPs) is considered as the most helpful to control the electricity consumption [1]. This may be realized by simply replacing the conventional electrical appliances to smarter appliances or even installing some smart interfaces like smart plugs to convert them to smarter ones.

DRPs enable us to reduce the greenhouse gas emission and improve grid efficiency as well as stability of the power plant by the smart usage of the electricity. In other words, more efficiency in the electricity market can be achieved by smartening the supply, consumption, distribution, and storage methods. Some of the advantages of using DRPs are listed as follows:


According to some studies [2, 3], DRPs are defined as the modification in demand by shifting or shedding the loads when there is a shortage or excess of power in response to the condition of suppliers. Since 1970s, DRPs appeared in the United States to control peak hours. In those decades, incentive programs [4] and priced-based programs such as time of use price (TOU) [5] were utilized to analyze and control the demand [6]. In the following decades, gradually other strategies and techniques have been used as demand response programs such as critical pick price (CPP) [7], real time price [8], 1-day-ahead price [9], and incremental block rate (IBR) price [10, 11]. Figure 1 shows the different types of demand response programs used till date in a chart.

However, DRPs could not individually reduce the electricity consumption or increase the rate of participants, as consumers do not have enough knowledge or cannot calculate and analyze their power consumption to control the electrical appliances according to commands from the utility companies [12]. Thus, intelligent equipment and technologies in grid infrastructure have appeared to control the dwellings' electricity consumption independently.

power consumption. However, the majority of appliances that are used in demand are still uncontrollable and they cannot participate in demand response programs to optimize the overall power consumption. Therefore, the main objective in participating in smart grid is by converting the conventional electrical appliances into the smart appliances by utilizing smart plugs. These smart plugs are able to monitor and control the electrical appliances by running

Transformation of Conventional Houses to Smart Homes by Adopting Demand Response Program in Smart Grid

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Over the last few decades, government bodies in many countries were responsible for controlling and monitoring of the electrical power plants while power systems were barely owned by the private sectors. The grid was designed to look like a tree, where generators were considered as the trunks, transmission paths represented as the branches, and loads considered as leaves [16] as shown in Figure 2. Therefore, this structure of the power plants was not efficient

Privatization of the power system was the key solution for many governments to provide the competitive market at different levels of generation, distribution, and transmission. Therefore,

on scheduled operation of the appliances.

Figure 1. Demand response programs used till date.

2. Development of electrical grids

enough to ensure the benefits of the producers.

2.1. Conventional grid

Nowadays, it is possible to develop small, cheap, and efficient smart controllers that can be used to gather different types of data, store, and analyze them by utilizing integrated technologies such as embedded systems, microcontrollers, and wireless communication technologies. Network sensors have a wide range of application in many aspects such as smart homes, military services, forecasting, industrial agriculture, and building energy management system.

Collected data can be sent in any communication ways, such as wireless network or to the host services to be shown on the web [13] in real time. Intelligent buildings are new concepts that refer to an electricity demand that use sophisticated technologies to provide better performance for energy management system. This could happen by using smart controllers besides the bidirection communication that enables the utility companies to monitor and control the power consumption of the group of residential units autonomously [14, 15].

Energy management systems can control the operation of appliances in response to electricity price or commands of utility companies to optimize the electricity consumption at peak hours. This can be done by smartening the electrical appliances in residential units to control their Transformation of Conventional Houses to Smart Homes by Adopting Demand Response Program in Smart Grid http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.74780 67

Figure 1. Demand response programs used till date.

power consumption. However, the majority of appliances that are used in demand are still uncontrollable and they cannot participate in demand response programs to optimize the overall power consumption. Therefore, the main objective in participating in smart grid is by converting the conventional electrical appliances into the smart appliances by utilizing smart plugs. These smart plugs are able to monitor and control the electrical appliances by running on scheduled operation of the appliances.
