# Development of a Low-Cost Automated Demand Response Controller for Home Energy Management
## 1 Introduction  
The power generation section of the Taiwan Power Company (TPC) might appear to have a gap in electrical energy due to the halt of Nuke 4 and the decommissioning of Nukes 1-3. The TPC gradually turns to stress and positively promotes various demand management measures (called demand response, DR). For having homes and business buildings capable of being involved in demand control and effectively responding to the demand suppression requirement from the power company (particularly in summer and the period when electrical energy might be in short supply), it is important and urgent to develop a demand response controller (DRC) with an automated demand response protocol (OpenADR) for users with several air conditioners. It is also crucial for all existing (old) installed air conditioners without any physical alteration to be able to participate in DR programs. Furthermore, the window-type or split-type air conditioners used in homes and office buildings all have infrared remote controls. Therefore, load controllers need to be capable of controlling these old-installed air conditioners via infrared control. However, few load controllers in Taiwan are compliant with the OpenADR 2.0 protocol and have the ability of infrared control. Therefore, we need to develop a load controller with infrared remote control ability that can be directly applied to the DR program to control old installed air conditioners. Research revealed that increasing the temperature setting of air conditioners by 1 \({}^{\circ}\)C would save 6% of power consumption. When the temperature of all air conditioners isset 1 \({}^{\circ}\)C higher, up to 3 hundred million kWh, for about 19 million air conditioners in Taiwan, would be saved in the summer, saving up to TWD 1 billion. In this case, when air conditioners are well controlled, the peak electricity consumption in summer could be reduced and carbon dioxide emission could be decreased to slow down the greenhouse effect on the earth. A demand response controller compliant with the Open ADR 2.0 protocol could be directly connected with an automated demand response (ADR) server, receive XML demand response instructions provided by a Web service, and control loads according to the shedding requirement in peak hours. Such a function allows the power company to rapidly announce ADR events through the Internet to aggregators or large-scale power users so that home and office building users, who consume more than half of total electricity, can be involved in ADR to assist significantly in the generation/load dispatch of the power company. After the emergence of the OpenADR protocol, home users involved in the DR would be vastly increased. When realizing OpenADR, some technical and non-technical issues would be encountered and overcome [1], and a low-cost ADR implementation is a key factor in the success of ADR [2]. References [2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10] address home energy management systems with participating ADR programs, but how to design the hardware implementation of an ADR controller is missing. References [11; 12; 13; 14] present the hardware implementation to comply with the OpenADR protocol; however, the infrared remote control ability is not included in dealing with ADR programs. Based on the fair energy scheduling method, [PERSON] et al. [15] examined Vickrey and Dutch auctions and coordination models in an electronic marketplace both analytically and empirically, in which no detailed hardware and software implementation of OpenADR and DRC were discussed. Since OpenADR has been used to lower the cost and difficulty of implementing ADR, some initial projects have focused on load management for peak reduction. However, some other essential targets of ADR are also expected, such as assets under control (distributed generation and storage) and functions (ancillary services and virtual power plants).