Smart Energy Consumption Feedback - Connecting Smartphones to Smart Meters

tinuously increasing and now accounts for about one third of the total electrical energy produced in Europe. Many individuals would be interested in saving energy (and thus also carbon dioxide as well as money), but they lack information on their consumption. Indeed, feedback on household electricity usage is typically only provided by monthly (or even annual) utility bills and therefore remains opaque to most households. Few people know how much electricity they consume, and even fewer have any idea how much electricity they use for a particular purpose (eg lighting). And even those who do have a fair understanding of their consumption patterns rarely receive guidance about the changes that would have the biggest impact on their electricity bills. Fortunately, emerging " smart " information and communication technologies can help to make electricity consumption visible to individuals [1]. For instance, next-generation digital electricity meters (" smart meters ") enable detailed electricity consumption information to be captured, processed, and communicated at frequent intervals (eg once per second). As smart meters are replacing traditional electricity meters in large parts of Europe, there is now a unique opportunity to realize comprehensive consumer feedback systems that consist of much more than mere remote metering applications. At ETH Zurich we seized the opportunity offered by this development. Within the eMeter project we connected smart meters to smartphones [2]. As they are almost always connected to the Internet and within reach of the user, using smartphones to visualize electricity consumption eliminates the need for costly in-house displays. The resulting system not only fits unobtrusively into the home environment, but also provides fine-grained electricity consumption information in real-time, enabling occupants to better understand their electricity consumption. The sensing and feedback system we developed consists of three loosely coupled components that are responsible for data acquisition, data handling, and data visualization. The first component consists of a state-of-the-art smart electricity meter that monitors the total household load. We extended the meter's functionality by incorporating a gateway module implemented on an embedded computing device equipped with flash storage and a WiFi communication module. This matchbox-sized gateway module also holds the second component of our system, a web server with a database. It manages the recorded metering data, performs data analysis, and handles incoming requests from the user interface. The carefully designed user interface, which forms the third component of our system, is realized as a mobile phone application on …