The Impact of a Smart Home Concept on Future Grids

Electric power systems are experiencing profound transformation driven by various factors. Bearing in mind the fact that most of today's electrical energy is produced using CO2 emitting fossil fuels, there is an obvious need to switch to renewable energy resources. Various new approaches under a 'Smart Gris umbrella' have thus emerged to tackle this problem. One of them is a so called Smart House (SH) concept, where several different distributed energy resources are installed in a house that enable the SH to become an active player in the operation of power systems. With the reduced price of solar PV we have already started to witness the concept to emerge in practice. Depending on the load profile, installing a roof‐top PV can already be feasible without any subsidies. As a result, the demand in the National Electricity Market (NEM) has dropped noticeably in the last couple of years. This trend is expected to continue in the future. Furthermore, with the anticipated increase in the residential electricity price of over 30% in the next few years, it is quite likely that also residential storage will become economically viable, which will result in increasing share of electrical energy being produced at the residential level.