Developing a flexible tariff mechanism for energy management of domestic prosumers based on demographic clustering

With the increasing application of decentralized generation and renewable integration, the problems created by the uncertainty of the renewable sources can be mitigated by the development of energy communities. The formation of energy communities can be made more inclusive in developing countries by considering the distinct energy use characteristics of users from different demographic regions. In this work the appliance based power usage characteristics of two prosumers representing urban and rural regions each have been modelled using LoadProGen and Matlab 2021. These profiles were further used to develop a demographic clustering based time of use tariff which was tested using an appliance preference based demand side management program developed using mixed integer linear programming. On comparing against a uniform tariff applied both to urban and rural participants of the energy community, the proposed method shows significant improvement in community energy cost for domestic application.