Adopting a more energy-efficient behaviour has never been so easy
Adopting an energy-efficient behavior (both at residential and at industrial scale) can play a
fundamental role to achieve the ambitious energy efficiency goals set by various regulatory bodies and
governments.
However, it is very difficult to get people to change their everyday routines and habits.
Monitoring your energy consumption, determining the optimal time in which an appliance in your home should be activated in order to minimize costs and optimize any potential presence of renewable sources like solar panels or wind turbines is time-consuming and usually requires a computer to be employed in order to calculate the optimal schedule.
Moreover, a resident who is accustomed to having domestic hot water ready for use at any time of day must be highly motivated by either monetary or some other potential type of encouragement to change his energy inefficient lifestyle. So, to promote a real change, it is important to make the change as smooth as possible: any unnecessary action required by the end user presents an additional burden, which risks decreasing their retention rate for the entire system, and consequently hinders exploitation of any energy and cost saving potential.
To solve this issue and provide added value for residents, the InBetween project has developed an Energy dispatch optimization service (EDOS) service.
This service performs calculations using specialized instances of a so-called Energy Hub model for each of the users’ houses by taking into account the appliances that the user has specified and shifting their activations in time, again, having in mind the shifting limits set by the user, and then returns the proposed optimal schedule for approval.
The user can choose to either use the service in automatic mode and apply the proposed optimal schedule
or to manually set at what time he wants the appliances to turn on or off.
This “remote control” feature, accessible through the interface of the mobile application, is another key
ingredient of this service allowing user to actuate upon their devices even when they are not at home or
are sleeping.
For example, using this service allows the user to schedule automatic activations of heating elements few hours prior to them waking, thus being energy efficient by not having the radiators working all night, but waking up in the same environment with much less spent energy and money. This can also be applied to scenarios when heating or cooling is to be applied prior to the tenants coming home after a long day out. Also, this service can also prevent damage from dangerous appliances like stoves or irons by having them still turned on upon leaving the home. This can be avoided by scheduling these appliances to be turned off at a predefined time every day, for example when the user goes to work.
Besides the added capabilities for appliance remote control, this innovative service also monitors the total energy consumption, estimated CO2 emissions and share of renewable energy for the initial and optimized schedule of appliance activations and presents to the end users the potential savings that can be achieved using the optimization service
