Sigma Orionis and the BeyWatch project are very pleased to announce that the Energy@Home project will be exhibiting at the ICT for sustainable homes event they are organising on Nov. 17 – 19 in Nice, France. Energy@Home will also be presented in depth through the conference sessions (more details coming soon).

Energy@home is a collaborative project between Electrolux, Enel, Indesit Company and Telecom Italia.

The aim of the project is to develop a communication infrastructure that enables provision of Value Added Services based upon information exchange related to energy usage, energy consumption and energy tariffs in the Home Area Network (HAN). The project envisions a protocol that shall be used to build an integrated platform to allow cooperation between the main devices involved in residential energy management, including the electronic meter, the smart appliances, the smart plugs, the home residential gateway and the customer interfaces.

From a functional point of view, Energy@Home envisions a system that can provide users with information on their household consumption directly on the display of the appliance itself, on the smart phone or on their computer. It is expected that, through easy access to information on consumption and through the possibility of downloading custom applications, consumers will be able to use their appliances in a “smart” way by enhancing the energy efficiency of the entire house system. For instance, Smart Appliances can start functioning at non-peak (and therefore less expensive) times of day as well as they can cooperate to avoid overloads by automatically balancing consumption without jeopardizing the proper execution of cycles.

The project is a further step towards the development of the so-called “smart grid“, that, in the future, will allow continuous real-time two-way information exchange between utilities and appliances in the houses to enable each customer to “self-manage” his/her energy behaviours depending on power supply availability and prices.