Open Architecture to Raise Awareness of Energy Consumption on the Home Environment

Abstract

The climate changes as well as the sustainability of our energy supplies present multiple challenges and require a worldwide coordinated response. Europe 2020 is a jigsaw of policies and measures binding targets for 2020 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, ensure 20% of renewable energy sources in the EU energy mix, and the reduction of EU global primary energy use by 20%. In the longer term, new generations of technologies have to be developed via breakthroughs in research if we are to meet the greater ambition of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80% by 2050. The reduction of the primary energy use can be accomplished with mentality awareness of the home users. By educating ourselves and those around us, our negative behaviors can be changed, creating a culture of sustainability. In order to achieve this goal, we are suggesting an open architecture with a friendly visualization interface that can be used to raise the households inhabitants awareness of their power consumption. With the proposed architecture, energy consumption data can be stored in a remote server and can be further processed in order to extract the power consumption for each electrical appliance, opening the door to the development of service extensions to provide user- and context-aware advice on how to save energy.