Novel intelligent energy management system for residential PV systems in non-feed-in tariff countries

Abstract

Currently within South Africa and other developing countries, net-metering policies are not yet widely implemented which hinders the adoption of residential PV systems. Without proper net-metering policies in place, the benefits of residential PV systems are limited to self-consumption as all energy fed into the utility grid is lost without remuneration. This leads to an inefficient and non-profitable PV system. To improve the efficiency and feasibility of the PV system in countries with no feed-in policy, it is of utmost importance that an energy management system (EMS) that optimises self-consumption, of the generated energy, be employed. A new intelligent PV EMS is proposed in this paper which takes historical data of energy consumption and forecasted weather information thereby optimising the energy consumption off the utility grid. Experimental results obtained from a real-world system showed that the local energy consumption percentage increased by 15- 20% when compared to a PV system with no EMS