IoT-assisted energy cooperation in adjacent buildings with interrupted utility

Facing severe power outages primarily due to generation shortfalls and transmission line losses, Pakistan is seeing an overwhelming shift in renewable energy sources both in residential and industrial buildings. Motivated by the same, efficient load sensing and management techniques – already available in the literature – are being adopted in modern construction their efficiency in terms of cost-savings, however, is still questionable. In this work, an Internet-of-Things (IoT) assisted energy cooperation scheme for adjacent buildings equipped with renewable energy sources is proposed for enhanced efficiency in energy management, with additional generators to cater for the power outages. The IoT network consists of a combination of local and global aggregators; while each building is equipped with a local aggregator to determine the current state of electricity, heating and cooling consumption and generation, the global aggregator, on the other hand, acts as an intelligent hub for energy cooperation. The latter determines the amount of energy to be shared among the buildings to minimize the overall energy cost. For theoretical realization of the proposed scheme, a comprehensive energy cooperative mathematical model is developed, whose objective function is presented as a nonlinear optimization problem – linearized using McCormick’s Envelopes. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed framework promises increased efficiency in terms of energy cost-savings; we support our claims with a detailed quantitative analysis.