Smart Grids & Smart Homes

Generating Added Value from Power-consumption Visualization: New Power-monitoring Solutions Deliver Multiple User Benefits
An large and exciting market is emerging for on-demand power measurement services that can track and visualize the electricity consumed by ubiquitous products such as household appliances and business equipment. Renesas’ customers are planning and developing usage monitoring and reporting systems that not only encourage and enable reductions in energy consumption, but also make possible many innovative value-added services. Such systems can be used, for example, to improve home or building security and to help safeguard children or other dependent family members who are home alone.
To support the diverse marketing opportunities encompassed by this trend in electronics technology, Renesas offers a wide range of low-cost general-purpose microcontrollers (MCUs) and supplies excellent technical support for applying them. Our semiconductor chips provide superlative performance, optimized features, robust connectivity capabilities and excellent reliability―and they operate efficiently, consuming very small amounts of power.
This article explains key aspects of solutions for electricity usage monitoring. It also illustrates the capabilities of our MCUs by describing a recently developed household power-monitoring demonstration unit. That demo system features an EMS (Energy Management System) controller that connects wirelessly to multiple micropower meters that deliver on-demand measurements of electricity consumption.
Looking for new ways to stem the rise in electricity consumption
Electricity usage continues to trend ever higher―a situation that, for economic and environmental reasons, is causing increased concern among many people and for many reasons. In homes, more electricity is being consumed due to factors such as the rising number of households, the wider use of electrical appliances, and the longer at-home time being spent by the elderly. Businesses are placing an increased load on the electricity grid primarily due to their greater use of electronic systems and electrical equipment to boost productivity.
Of course, both consumers and businesses are impacted negatively by the rising costs associated with higher electricity consumption. Thus, they are looking for and adopting effective methods for saving energy. Additionally, governmental regulations are giving businesses additional reasons to be concerned. In Japan, for example, revisions to the Energy Saving Act came into full force in 2010. Provisions in this law obligate companies to reassess their energy use, implement energy-management standards, and install energy-saving devices. The law also strongly encourages firms to work toward reducing their rates of electricity consumption over the middle to long term.
Making detailed electricity usage data available in a timely manner
Today, electricity usage generally is reported periodically, mainly in the aggregate. Typically, consumption is totaled and that total is announced only when the utility’s invoice arrives. If usage data could made available in real time (or nearly real time) and attributed to specific appliances, systems, applications or pieces of equipment, then valuable insight could be obtained for eliminating wasteful energy expenditures. Consumers, business owners, utilities and the global environment would all gain important advantages if the higher, more-immediate level of usage insight prompts and allows reasonable corrective actions.
That realization is opening new opportunities for electronic systems that can provide visualized assessments of nearly instantaneous updates of electricity consumption. Management at Renesas has recognized that today households and businesses are poised to become large markets for versatile power-monitoring solutions. We see this development as an important component of the bigger movement toward the adoption of Smart-Grid technology worldwide. (See the Online EDGE story, ‘Smart Grid’ Technology Is Essential Globally for Aiding the Environment .)
Our marketers have also discovered that the prospect of power-monitoring systems becoming economically available in the near future is already driving the worldwide emergence of energy-saving consulting services. Additionally, they have learned that numerous ideas are being generated for other types of secondary innovations―applications that process fine-grained energy-usage data and then use the results to generate useful new capabilities with considerable sales potential.
Installing systems for collecting, analyzing and using energy data
There are many ways that a service provider could install an electronic system that would help a customer use electricity more wisely and thereby save money. In a typical household, for example, the implementation might include the following basic steps: First, the service provider would install electricity meters into air conditioners, refrigerators, TVs, lighting circuits, and other major appliances. These meters would be used to deliver on-demand consumption readings. The provider would then collect the data with an EMS controller and send that formatted information via the Internet to its host computer system.
After quickly processing and analyzing the data, the service provider could present usage information visually, generating timely alerts and recommendations for making energy reductions. Beyond that, it might even be more proactive if it were allowed to remotely turn off or adjust the settings of selected products and systems within the customer’s home, thereby directly enabling savings on the customer’s electricity bill.
Various other applications are possible, augmenting the basic capabilities of systems that provide energy-consumption visualization. On-demand power readings, for instance, might be used to provide home security when the house is vacant. They could also help monitor the safety and wellbeing of children or infirm family members who are at home alone, issuing alerts when abnormal energy usage data indicates problems.
Offering monitoring solutions for driving the greater use of visualization
The application engineers at Renesas stand ready to propose and support the rapid, low-cost development of new electricity monitoring systems built with our high-performance, highly reliable, power-efficient microcontrollers. These MCUs support numerous communications protocols, including Ethernet and ZigBee. A typical system would profile electrical consumption patterns in homes and in commercial buildings, based on data from micropower meters installed in appliances, at circuit breakers, in Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) equipment and business machines, etc. We are also developing ideas for ways that customers can use such on-demand measurements to deliver to end users a range of profitable new services (see Figure 1).

Figure 1  New energy-monitoring applications.

In particular, we foresee the development of three types of services that are likely to become very popular: home security, occupant safety checks, and energy management:

• A security service would track energy use when the house is unoccupied and generate an alert if the usage spikes upward.
• A safety-checking service would maintain a watch over single occupants, infirm occupants, or children by creating a daily energy-use profile and then looking for unexpected changes. Power monitors and other sensors would be installed in rooms where cameras would be inappropriate.
• An energy-management service would use various types of sensors, positioned in appliances and also out in the open, to deliver real-time detection of various conditions―such as the temperature and humidity in each room, whether lights are on or off, and whether the refrigerator door is open or closed. That data would then used by a power monitoring system to implement more effective power control.