Abstract Smart grids are contributing to the demand-side management by integrating electronic equipment, distributed energy generation and storage, and advanced meters and controllers. With the increasing adoption of electric vehicles and distributed energy generation and storage systems, residential energy management is drawing more and more attention, which is regarded as being critical to demandsupply balancing and peak load reduction. In this paper, we focus on a microgrid scenario in which modern homes interact together under a large-scale setting to better optimize their electricity cost. We fifirst incentivize households to form a group using an economic stimulus. Then we formulate the energy expense optimization problem of the household community as a multi-agent coordination problem and present an Entropy-Based Collective Multiagent Deep Reinforcement Learning (EB-CMADRL) framework to address it. Experiments with various real-world data demonstrate that EBC-MADRL can reduce both the long-term group power consumption cost and daily peak demand effectively compared with existing approaches