Abstract: 

The electricity consumption in residential buildings is on the rise due to the increasing incorporation of heating and cooling loads along with the increasing penetration of electric vehicles. According to the Internal Energy Agency (IEA) word energy outlook 2020, the residential sectors account for 26.9% of the world’s final total electricity consumption. With changing house loads dynamics to DC, a significant amount of energy is lost due to AC to DC conversion. While the utility grid is AC in nature, it is high time to evaluate more efficient building level distribution to cater to the changing load dynamics, as highly efficient DC loads are replacing the conventional AC loads in modern buildings. Furthermore, these newer building architectures must efficiently incorporate green technologies such as solar photovoltaics (PV) and battery storage, generating and storing DC energy, respectively. So, this work evaluates DC-based residential architectures at multiple voltage levels. The work is also complemented by a techno-economic analysis of these systems with a stable energy management system for a typical DC home.  

For DC-only home systems, the most significant problem that hinders DC homes' immediate deployment is that unlike standardized AC distribution (110V, 60Hz or 220V, 50Hz), the existing DC distribution standards are disjoint, ranging from 48V to 380V. With the system’s efficiency due to distribution voltage selection at stake, it is essential to carefully select a suitable DC voltage level for the residential power network based on the typical load requirements and the variety of available generation. Hence, in this work, a framework for analyzing the impact of various DC voltage levels based upon the loss analysis is also developed. Various other aspects are also elaborated in the publications (cited below) emerging out of the thesis.  

Publication: 

J1)    Siraj K, Awais M, Khan HA, Zafar A, Hussain A, Zaffar NA, Jaffery SH. “Optimal power dispatch in solar‐assisted uninterruptible power supply systems”. International Transactions on Electrical Energy Systems. 2020 Jan;30(1):e12157. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2050-7038.12157 

J2)    Siraj K, Khan HA. “Dc distribution for residential power networks—a framework to analyze the impact of voltage levels on energy efficiency.” Energy Reports. 2020 Nov 1; 6:944-51. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352484719313757 

C1)  Siraj K, Ahsan SM, Khan HA “Techno-economic Evaluation of Residential DC Power Systems on Multiple Distribution Voltages.” Accepted for 48th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference (PVSC 48), USA, June 2021.