An Overview Of Home Energy Management Systems For Beginners

Energy management systems (EMS) are a growing sector in the modern days of smart homes and smart grids. Energy consumption in the building sector indicates the importance of improving the consumption of energy in homes. EMS can provide value to business owners and homeowners and the utility by saving energy and money by providing a mixture of scheduling, control, and user information. 

EMS can monitor the consumption of energy of a home to help homeowners adapt their energy usage behaviors based on the feedback they get from the system. EMS can also play an important role in supporting utility demand response programs and reducing peak demand.

One of the requirements of EMS is to improve the consumption of energy in buildings and homes which require specific capabilities. The system must be capable of communicating with different home devices for control and monitoring. The system should also be capable of performing external communication with the local utility for getting DR signals. The system needs to have some intelligence to be able to analyze data such as the consumption of energy and provide the necessary feedback to users. 

It should create schedules based on the consumption of energy behavior, users’ priorities and systems goals. Due to the nature of the EMS capabilities and communication in a residence or building, cybersecurity should be a capability. 

However, energy management is not as easy as it seems. The integration of home devices with EMS presents some challenges. It, therefore, requires collaboration from utilities, homeowners and industries. Homeowners require a better awareness of the consumption of energy and its effect on the environment. 

Utilities need to provide useful and necessary information to the homeowner or business owner. Commercial home devices should offer the proper functionality and communications. Since each device supports a specific protocol for communication, EMS should be able to facilitate communication between devices. Smart grids can offer energy consumption in different time granularities and the system can end up with a lot of data that needs to be analyzed and managed. Efficient and smart machine learning based on algorithms should be developed to understand the energy consumption patterns of the homeowner and make the necessary adjustment to reduce peak demand and save energy. 

EMS required specifications 

Improving energy efficiency in buildings and homes is the main goal of EMS. Additional goals may include utility benefits such as controlling the usage of energy to reduce peak demand and support the shifting of load. To achieve these goals, EMS should support specific features and capabilities. These features and capabilities are explained below. 

Device monitoring and control 

EMS should be able to control and monitor different appliances and devices in a home. The information of a device can be available to users via phone applications or web interface.

Intelligence 

Most users don’t have any understanding or visibility of their energy usage so they might not be able to make the right decisions to reduce energy consumption. It would be beneficial for energy management systems to provide feedback to the user and make automatic adjustments if the user allows it.