‘Smart’ Is Not Free: Energy Consumption of Consumer Home Automation Systems

The proliferation of consumer Home Automation Systems (HAS), which is increasingly based on the Internet of Things (IoT) architecture, comes with added costs for the additional electrical energy required to power the automation interfaces and the standby energy consumption required to maintain connectivity and/or “smartness”. In this article, we use a bottom-up approach to develop novel system-level energy consumption models for consumer HAS devices and quantify the energy consumption for a typical HAS. We then assess the potential impact on global Information and Communications Technology (ICT) energy use. We show that, on average, HAS may consume over one-third of the annual energy used in a mid-sized home, with non-trivial impact on the global ICT energy footprint.