Home energy management systems: Design guidelines for the communication infrastructure

Households account for a notable amount of overall energy consumption, thus they represent a field where it is possible to potentially obtain great energy savings. Energy management systems (EMSs) can be used to this end. They allow for monitoring and managing energy consumption of household appliances or renewable energy sources, as well as making users aware of their energy consumptions. User awareness has been shown to yield up to 20% of energy savings. In this paper, we propose a design procedure for the communication network of a home energy management system (HEMS). We discuss design choices of a HEMS which is currently under development within the MONERGY project, an initiative aiming at boosting the energy awareness of households in two regions: Carinthia (Austria) and Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Italy). Although the system is tailored to the peculiarities of the regions, we believe that the proposed design guidelines can be of help for engineers of EMSs. In particular, the work addresses key issues of the communication network requirements such as coverage, topology, number of nodes, metering resolution and communication technologies. Furthermore, real world tests of wireless and power line communication (PLC) technologies are carried out to see whether existing HEMSs satisfy the communication network requirements.