The residential market represents an important part of the global energy consumption. However it is one of the hardest places to improve our energy e ciency. Several solutions exist with di erent approaches, however their adoption and results are suboptimal. We believe that this occurs due to the fragmentation of the solutions, up-front costs and a some lack of focus on the user experience. In this paper, we present a consumer centric, cloud-based Home Energy Management platform. Its aims are: to build the foundations of a hardware agnostic solution, supporting the main open data sources available and enlarging the potential interested consumer base; provide actionable metrics and consumption simulations that give insight to the user and help understand the impact of habits and choices; explore the potential of Internet of Things and cloud based energy management; and nally, to achieve in a marketready solution that can be sustainable and e ectively drive change.
The residential market is responsible for an important part of the global energy
consumption, representing 26,65% [
Many concepts and market solutions have been developed in the Home
Energy Management (HEM) eld. Yet the market reality has failed to comply with
expectations [
An interesting alternative is to move the intelligence to the cloud where it can
be iterated and updated quickly, while leaving just the sensors and actuators in
home. This enables lighter business models with lower costs for the customers up
front. In this way the user can take advantage from the state of the art of HEM
technology and pay by what is e ectively used. This results in a more e cient
solution from a data processing point of view; but also from a business point of
view, since the since the cloud based management enables relevant economies of
scale [
The cloud potential as base for innovation through open data and communication
has been until now reasonably overlooked where the possible exceptions are the
deprecated Google Power Meter3 and the HITS concept [
The ultimate goal of this platform is to enable an Internet of Things focused
on energy management, building upon the many interesting concepts on this
eld [
The e ectiveness of such platform depends on its capability of integrating most
of the main sensoring and actuation solutions. This presents a challenge to
support a broad set of communication protocols. Looking into the power monitoring
systems today, which is more a mature market than the control and actuation,
one can understand that most data can be acquired simply through HTTP which
simpli es its implementation. The exception are the smart meters that use
standards like DLMS [
In this case, HTTP was selected as a priority in order to support immediately the market represented by power meters such as Current Cost4 and The Energy Detective5. Another key element that make this selection obvious is that the integration with these systems through HTTP is based on open APIs, unlike the use of DLMS by utilities which is naturally closed to their infrastructure. The communication with these systems can also be made through brokers such 3 http://www.google.com/powermeter/about/ 4 http://www.currentcost.com/ 5 http://www.theenergydetective.com/ as Cosm6, or in the future the middleware solutions from utilities for which Tendril7 can be seen as a possible example. A simpli ed vision of the integration architecture can be seen in Figure 2.1. This platform is currently deployed in heroku8, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) hosting solution built upon Amazon EC29 that simpli es the administration while keeping the advantages of the cloud.
Present systems integrated to the platform are: Cloogy10, Current Cost Envi, The Energy Detective and the Tendril API11. These systems act generally as energy consumption data sources. 2.2
Control solutions at low price points start to appear in the market. Examples of this are Cloogy which o ers smart plugs that can be remotely controlled through an API, and through the just launched Wemo12 from Belkin, which provides control and movement sensing. This type of integrations are already present in more early adopter segments where the IFTTT13 association with Wemo stands out. In this eld exciting times are coming with the arrival of the 6 http://cosm.com 7 http://tendrilinc.com/ 8 http://heroku.com 9 http://aws.amazon.com/pt/ec2/ 10 http://cloogy.com 11 http://dev.tendrilinc.com/ 12 http://www.belkin.com/wemo/ 13 http://ifttt.com/recipes/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=wemo Internet of Things and the growing awereness for energy issues, and cloud based solutions are a natural enabler due to its ubiquity and quick evolution potential.
However this trend will only evolve organically when the more tech enabled consumers start experimenting and creating mashups between the Internet of Things, HEM solutions and even other web applications. This makes the o er of an open, powerful and well documented API a crucial step for the e ectiveness of a platform in this context. 2.3
Web and mobile apps are also a driver for smart energy solutions adoption, by enabling rich, frequently real-time energy management through already omnipresent devices. But these apps require access to actionable, meaningful data that can be easily crunched in the cloud. For unplugg, an iOS app was developed that provide actionable metrics which allow users to track progress, and complements the view o ered by the main platform interface. 3
Cloud based energy management presents several advantages comparing with home based control systems, such as e ciency, low entry barrier, increased ease of adoption, global and ubiquitous potential of integration. It can hence be a technological solution to tackle the slow adoption of HEM systems. In this paper a global platform named unplugg was presented. It stands out by enabling the support of multiple data sources and empower the innovation through the Internet of Things while keeping a user-centric vision. It is currently in beta at http://unplu.gg.