High-Power Load Management for Residential House under Desert Climate Conditions - A Case Study in Qatar

Abstract

Located as a Peninsula in the east of Arabia and bordering the Persian Gulf, Qatar has a unique desert weather condition with strong irradiance, high temperature, high humidity, and soiling issues. To maintain a comfort level of living under this arid climatic condition, Residential houses need to be equipped with necessary facilities and high-power home appliances such as Air-Conditioners, water heaters, refrigerators, pool pumps, laundries and so on. Also, electricity cost could be very different at peak time and non-peak time through the day. To achieve a better cost-efficient electricity consumption, optimization control of load consumption for local residential house is studied in this paper. Firstly, a dedicated house model with thermal dynamics under local conditions is developed in this paper. Based on this model, optimal cost-oriented load control and consumption management based on optimization tool is proposed. Also, by designing constraint criteria, the comfort level of housing indoor temperature is guaranteed and energy consumption upper boundary is restricted. Finally, the optimization control scheme is verified through a scenario under typical seasonal weather conditions. The results shows that the lowest cost of energy consumption can be achieved by the proposed optimization control of house load management.