The Building Energy Watcher project

Unfortunately, global warming is a fact. Temperature has risen by 0.76ºC since the industrial revolution (0.95ºC in Europe) and it is projected to rise by 1.4–5.8ºC globally (2.0–6.3ºC in Europe) by 2100. The last time climate change happened at this pace was 125,000 years ago, and it led to a 4-6 meter sea level rise and large loss of animal life. Along with rising temperatures, energy demand in Europe is increasing. The economic crisis lowered this rise, but it still continues. Moreover, due to lower ownership cost, the installation of energy hungry building cooling systems in homes and workplaces rises rapidly. This adds even more to energy consumption and surcharges the electricity distribution network. As a result, especially during the summer period, the complete electricity distribution network in Southern Europe is working under extremely high loads, leading many times to unexpected voltage drops and black outs.

In order to tackle increasing electricity demand, a number of solutions for efficient energy consumption, generation of energy from renewable sources, and new power distribution business models for active energy control have been considered. Some of them have even been pushed via regulations at national and European levels. For example in Spain, in August 2007, it was decided to replace all electricity meters to allow for examination of the hourly rates of energy in such a way that users could tune their consumption pattern and contracts to the lower rates provided by the utility at given times of the day. This fact puts in perspective the need for a revolution in the way the energy market is being operated, with more flexible tariff schemes and more intelligent grids!

Targeting environmental sustainability, energy efficiency, and new power distribution business models is the Building Energy Watcher (BeyWatch) project. This project aims to design, develop, and evaluate an innovative, energy-aware, flexible and user-centric solution, able to provide interactive energy monitoring, intelligent control and power demand balancing at the home, block and neighborhood level. The system will interconnect legacy professional/consumer electronic devices with a new generation of energy-aware white-goods in a common network, where multilevel hierarchic metering, control, and scheduling will be applied, based on power demand, network conditions and personal preferences. The application of BeyWatch will result in a more balanced energy-consumption profile and in considerable energy conservation gains at local (flat, home, office or single-building) level, as well as for larger geographical regions (large buildings, squares and neighborhoods).

Figure 1: BeyWatch hierarchical network architecture

As shown in Figure 1, the BeyWatch concept includes a hierarchical network architecture of interactive metering and intelligent control devices.

At building level, BeyWatch starts by introducing a new small scale Combined Photovoltaic/Solar panel (CPS) as a local Renewable Energy Source (RES).  In our prototypes, the CPS/RES system produces 1 kWp of electric power and 200 liters of hot water in a temperature range from 50 to 70°C (122 - 158°F), and can report the exact amount of available energy resources via a networked interface.

The next pieces in the building energy-management puzzle are the new BeyWatch white appliances. These are energy-aware and remote controlled white good devices, namely a refrigerator, dishwasher and washing machine. The BeyWatch white goods have very low energy consumption (due to various optimizations in their electronics, with their leading optimization being an intelligent motor control system), are network controlled, energy-aware and may optimally use the local available energy resources (electric energy and hot water).

The energy consumption at building/home level is controlled in an optimal way by the BeyWatch Agent platform. The Agent functionality is split between an in-home Residential Gateway (RG) and an intelligent metering device, which will measure and control the building power consumption. The Agent is an OSGi based platform that records user requests (clothes washed by 18:00, dishes washed by 16:00), preferences/habits (bath at 20:00, living room at 21ºC), weather conditions and daily forecasts (via Internet), potential electricity time-varying tariffs, and communicates with the CPS/RES, the intelligent white goods and many home sensors and actuators in order to schedule and coordinate the energy consumption in an optimal way.

At neighbor level, the BeyWatch Agents are coordinated by the BeyWatch Supervisor platform. Based on network topology and the deployment scenario, the BeyWatch Supervisor may vary from a simple service information aggregator to a distributed electricity trader and grid controller.

Moving one level higher in the BeyWatch network hierarchy, we arrive at the energy utility Service Center. In BeyWatch, we aim to extend the classic telecommunication services infrastructure with new stakeholders in the utilities domain, new information, new business tools and services, so that the final user can act not only as a customer, but also as an active prosumer (producer and consumer) of energy and information. On one hand, they can generate energy through the proposed CPS/RES system that can be “sold” via the public network, and on the other can gather energy consumption information that is processed in the home network first (by the Agent) and then at the neighbor level (by the Supervisor) to be used by the energy providers to tune the generation process and meet market demands. The users themselves may know and improve their energy consumption profile and then negotiate with the energy utilities for more accurate and profitable contracts. By allowing consumers to shift their electricity consumption demands, they may benefit from much lower bills while the utility companies may benefit from balanced energy demand and smaller peaks.

Figure 2: BeyWatch Business Support System concept

Evaluation of the BeyWatch solution will be executed in three main directions:

• Internal evaluation of each project’s objective through simulations, laboratory trials, evaluations, etc.
• Results evaluation through laboratory trials which will be also submitted to the judgment of a number of potential users. This will specifically help the consortium to evaluate the degree of acceptability of the BeyWatch system and services (or part of it) in every-day life.
• Comparison of BeyWatch cost/benefits with other projects/solutions running in Europe. This will help European politicians to evaluate and capitalize on the most effective solutions for Europe in order to save energy and reduce CO2 emissions.

In more detail, BeyWatch end-to-end intelligent monitoring and control for efficient energy consumption/generation will be validated at EDF laboratories in France and at the Smart Home Demonstrator testbed provided by Telefonica Research Labs in Spain. The latter Smart Home Demonstrator concentrates all of the service concepts developed so far by the Residential Systems group of Telefonica Research into permanent integration for validation purposes.The BeyWatch project will enhance the testbed by adding new enhanced services (energy monitoring & peak smoothing, white goods control, water management, energy generation/distribution).

Figure 3:  BeyWatch Validation environment

Currently, the TID Smart Home Demonstrator comprises an end-to-end architecture based on the OSGi standard, where personal services are installed on a “home service gateway” accessible both from inside and outside the house. Within BeyWatch, this environment will be ‘upgraded’ with the BeyWatch Agent (RG functionality provided by Synelixis and intelligent metering device provided by EDF) and Supervisor subsystems. Moreover, the RES/CPS system (provided by the University of Palermo) along with a refrigerator (provided by Gorenje), a washing machine and a dishwasher (provided by Fagor), will be installed to test the effects of energy efficiency and hot water management. System and energy consumption simulations are provided by Germanischer Lloyd.

The BeyWatch platform may be exploited as a complete end-to-end system solution that offers the advantages already explained. However, it is worth noting that BeyWatch modular and flexible architecture also offers incremental and phased exploitation and benefits for the user, the service provider and the environment. For example, a user that already has a service RG with BeyWatch compatible physical interfaces or a service provider that offers added-value home services may take advantage of the BeyWatch in-home solution and achieve efficient energy consumption via intelligent home automation and control. Adding a BeyWatch dishwasher or washing machine may get additional features, even increased by a CPS/RES system in both energy and hot water management. If the customer applies for a flexible electricity consumption contract and an intelligent metering device is installed, the benefits are further increased. On the other hand, the CPS/RES by itself may offer benefits in home electricity and hot water management. In this way, BeyWatch’s flexible, incremental & phased exploitation approach is aimed to achieve wide-scale adoption, allowing users to get immediate energy consumption reductions and benefits by lowering their monthly electricity bills.

Acknowledgements
The BeyWatch project is partially funded by the European Commission under the contract ICT-223888. The BeyWatch consortium consists of Telefonica I+D, Synelixis Solutions, EDF Group, Germanischer Lloyd, Gorenje, Fagor, University of Palermo and Sigma Orionis.

About the Authors
Dr. Theodore Zahariadis received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and his Dipl.-Ing. degree in computer engineering from the University of Patras, Greece. Currently, he is the technical coordinator of the EC ICT projects: COAST, AWISSENET and BeyWatch. He is also heavily involved in the EU Future Internet Assembly (FIA) activities; he coordinates the Future Media Internet subgroup as caretaker, while he participates in the Real World Internet/”Internet of Things”, the Future Services Internet and the Secure Future Internet subgroups. He is also the coordinator of the Networked Media Group 1: Media Delivery Platforms cluster, a cluster of more than 15 EC projects. In the past, he has been with Ellemedia Technologies as Technical Director, Hellenic Aerospace Industry (HAI) as Chief Engineer, and Lucent Technologies/Bell-Laboratories, NJ as a Senior Consultant. Since 1994, he has participated in many ACTS, ESPRIT and IST projects as Senior Researcher, Technical Manager or Project Manager. He is also an Assoc. Professor at the Technological Educational Institution of Chalkida. Dr. Zahariadis has published more than 80 papers in magazines, journals and conferences and he is the author of two books and many book chapters. He has been a reviewer and principal guest editor in many IEEE and ACM journals and magazines and he is a Technical Editor of the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine.

Mr. Pierre Plaza received his Electrical and Communications Engineering bachelors degree at the "Universidad Iberoamericana" Mexico city. He graduated at the beginning of 1985 and joined ERICSSON Mexico, ATE division. In 1986-1987 he received a Masters in Electrical Engineering (MEE) at Philips International Institute in the Netherlands. From 1987 until 1989 he worked at Philips Research Laboratories (Eindhoven) in the field of VLSI design. From 1991 he joined TELEFONICA I+D and worked in the microelectronics division. Since 2001 he has been in charge of the Division on the Digital Home working area. The main task of this division is to define and develop services for the digital home. He has a lot of experience in EC projects Management and leadership (more than 10 different projects).