TOU Tariff System Using Data from Smart Meters

Recently, electric utilities have been scrutinized worldwide for their environmental impact, depletion of resources, and the consistently rising cost of electricity to customers. All these issues could be reduced if residential customers changed their demand patterns. This research focuses on one of the most common demand-side management programs, which consists of time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. This tariff system has the potential to reduce peak energy demand, which will decrease costs and carbon dioxide emissions from utilities. Also, this system will allow more efficient use of existing electricity generation and network capacity. In this paper, an optimal TOU tariff system is proposed, and its impact is assessed on a dataset of residential users in a town where smart meters are installed. Changes in the electricity demand profile and ability of the electrical supply to support loads with no or minimal load shedding are studied.