Home energy management as a service over networking platforms

About 40% of the U.S. primary energy is consumed in the buildings. Therefore, to manage the energy consumption and its usages pattern, for instance, the U.S. state of California mandated Zero Net Energy buildings by 2020 for the residential sector (22% of the U.S. primary energy). Moreover, towards this goal, U.S. Department of Energy, Building Technologies Office is trying to develop techniques to improve the efficiency of buildings. Home Energy Management (HEM) may be used to improve the energy consumption in the residential buildings. However, the cost, scalability, and flexibility of the software and hardware architectures available, have increased the time-to-market and have made HEMs hard to penetrate the consumer market. To solve these limitations, in this paper, we have presented a novel HEM platform, which utilizes a low power IEEE 802.15.4 standard to monitor and control all the appliances in a house. Moreover, it utilizes Service-Oriented Architecture and Devices Profile for Web Services to implement the monitoring and controlling algorithms and therefore may significantly improve the scalability and flexibility of the platform. Also, some other features like: plug-n-play capability, remote access feature, and open source architecture are implemented in this platform. Finally, a table-top prototype of the HEM platform is demonstrated in the paper.