Retail Energy Management With Predictive Rate Plan Switching
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Solution Overview
Problem
The energy management systems for consumers lack efficient tools for monitoring and managing energy usage across deregulated, partially deregulated, and regulated markets, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs due to the absence of unbiased information and automated management solutions.
Innovation Solution
The development of a system that includes smart appliances and a resource management server, enabling real-time monitoring and control of energy usage, providing consumers with projected costs based on historical data and current utility rates, and allowing for optimized energy consumption planning through aggregation of smart meter data and integration with IoT devices.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If consumers manually monitor and manage energy usage without automated tools, then they have simple system requirements, but energy management efficiency deteriorates and costs increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system enables automated energy management where the smart appliance and resource management server perform monitoring, data aggregation, and cost calculation functions autonomously without requiring manual consumer intervention. The system self-manages energy usage tracking and provides projected costs automatically.
Solution Approach 2:
The resource management server acts as an intermediary between smart appliances, smart meters, and consumers. It aggregates data from multiple sources, processes information, and presents unified energy management insights to consumers, simplifying the complexity of direct appliance-to-consumer data flows.
2Loss of information
If consumers use multiple energy providers and manual monitoring methods, then system complexity is low, but information completeness deteriorates and bias increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges data from multiple energy providers, smart meters, and appliance sources into a unified energy management platform. The resource management server consolidates information from deregulated, partially deregulated, and regulated market sources, providing comprehensive and unbiased energy usage information.
3Measurement precision
If real-time monitoring and data aggregation are implemented, then energy usage visibility is improved, but processing requirements and system complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary data aggregation and processing at the resource management server before presenting information to consumers. Historical data and current utility rates are pre-processed to generate projected costs, reducing the computational burden during real-time consumer interactions.
Data Source
AI summary
The disclosure includes methods, systems and apparatus for predictive management of efficient selecting and receiving of retail electric utility service to a facility for a period, by automated selecting of a retail utility service provider corresponding to a selected least cost path of predicted rate plan choices across the period, wherein costs of all possible, viable time-bounded predicted rate plan choices are determined for predicted consumer usage where a predicted market of retail rate formulas for the period are predicted in relation to at least one variable, such as weather.