A Novel Home Energy Management System Environmental-based with LCA Minimization

This paper presents a novel environmental-based home energy management system that focuses on the environmental impact caused by residential electricity consumption. It is aimed to reduce the carbon footprint by minimizing the kg of carbon dioxide equivalent, considering all the stages of the life-cycle of the generation sources utilized, from cradle-to-grave. The global warming potential indicator is used to decide if it is more sustainable to purchase electricity from the grid or to use flexible generation sources at homes, such as batteries or photovoltaic generation. This new energy management system endeavors to give the end-user a more influential role in the climate change solution, giving up the reduction of its electricity bill in exchange for causing a low environmental impact by minimizing its greenhouse gas emissions. The results prove that in periods of significant penetration of renewable sources in the energy mix, it is more sustainable to buy electricity from the grid than discharging batteries or using the photovoltaic surplus energy to charge them. The proposed environmental-based energy management system almost halves the emissions originated by the residential consumption compared with the price-based service, which prioritizes the minimization of energy costs.