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© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Governments are focusing on citizen participation in the energy transition, e.g., with dynamic electricity tariffs, which pass part of the wholesale price volatility to end users. While often the cheapest alternative, these tariffs require micromanagement for optimization. In this research, an automated system capable of supplying electricity for home use at minimal cost called Smart Relays and Controller (SRC) is presented. SRC scrapes prices online, charges a battery system during the cheapest time slots and supplies electricity to the home energy system from the cheapest source, either the battery or the grid, while optimizing battery life. To validate the system, a comparison is made between SRC, a programmable scheduler and PVPC (Spain’s dynamic tariff) using twenty-eight months of hourly historical data. SRC is shown to be superior to both the scheduler and PVPC, with the scheduler performing worse than SRC but better than PVPC (T.T., p < 0.001). SRC achieves a 36.16% discount over PVPC, 13.89% when factoring in battery life. The savings are 44.24% higher with SRC than with a scheduler. Neither inflation nor incentives to reduce costs are considered. While we studied Spain’s tariff, SRC would work in any country offering dynamic electricity tariffs, with benefit margins dependent on their particularities.

Details

Title
Home Electricity Sourcing: An Automated System to Optimize Prices for Dynamic Electricity Tariffs
Author
Sierra Juan Felipe Garcia 1 ; Fernández, Jesús Fernández 1 ; Fernández-Lázaro, Diego 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Guerrero-Higueras Ángel Manuel 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; del Castillo Virginia Riego 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Sánchez-González Lidia 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Department of Mechanical, Informatics and Aerospace Engineering, Universidad de León, 24071 León, Spain; [email protected] (J.F.F.); [email protected] (Á.M.G.-H.); [email protected] (V.R.d.C.); [email protected] (L.S.-G.) 
 Department of Cellular Biology, Genetics, Histology and Pharmacology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Universidad de Valladolid, Campus de Soria, 42004 Soria, Spain; [email protected] 
First page
73
Publication year
2025
Publication date
2025
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
25042289
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3194490178
Copyright
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.