Residential energy efficiency over a persuasive internet of things based feedback

Abstract

In developing countries today, the population growth and the increasing penetration of higher standard of living electrical appliances in domestic places has resulted in a rapidly increasing residential load. In South Africa, the recent rolling blackouts and electricity price increase only highlighted this reality calling for sustainable measures to reduce the overall consumption and peak load. The cost and effectiveness of energy Utility residential intervention campaigns and the complexities linked to the architectural limitations of Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) have long restricted grid interventions to the commercial and manufacturing sectors. Nevertheless, the dawn of the smart grid, smart energy meters, low-priced sensors, and embedded devices coupled with Internet-related technologies have paved the way to novel residential energy management interventions involving networking and interaction amongst devices, consumers, and the grid. In this regard, the Internet of Things (IoT), an enabler for intelligent and efficient HEMS, is seeing increasing attention in Home Area Network (HAN) design optimization while mitigating related cost limitations. This work presents the design and implementation of an IoT platform for residential smart-grid applications with the requirement of low cost, interoperability, scalability, and technology availability. The work focuses on the backend complexities of IoT home area networks (HAN) using IoT middleware. Cloud technologies as smart-grid tools augment the quality and services in IoT systems participating reducing the cost and complexities of HEMS. Thus, this work leverages open-source Cloud technologies from Back4App as BaaS to provide consumers and Utilities with a data communication platform for time and space agnostic “mind-changing” consumption feedback, appliance operation control, and Demand-Response Management(DRM) via an Android App. Considering these prerequisites, the platform uses the Open Consortium Foundation(OCF) IoTivity-Lite middleware and implemented different case-study for awareness feedback and demand-side management.