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The energy crisis of 2008 in South Africa, due to electricity demand surpassing supply and a depleted electricity reserve margin has exposed the need for more synergy between home energy management systems (HEMS) and supply side energy management systems (SSEMS). Demand side management (DSM) techniques have been investigated and proven to be viable means of regulating electricity demand from the consumer side. However, the viability of DSM is dependent on the participation of willing consumers. In this paper, a combined energy management system (CEMS) is proposed to provide a platform for incorporating the demands and constraints of consumers (time of dispatch, reduction of electricity costs, etc.) and suppliers (reduced operations cost, reduced emissions, etc.). The proposed CEMS utilizes dynamic pricing (DP) and a standard deviation biased genetic algorithm (SDBGA) in …