Energy awareness, an important goal for empowering the end customer

Abstract

Sustainable use of energy through an increased public and individual awareness is an important goal from several perspectives: it is a useful mean to obtain energy savings based on users behavior change, it is a way to understand the local and general context of energy ecosystem related to renewable energy contribution and to carbon footprint and its possible correlation with ambient factors. Thus it helps the citizens in being more responsible towards energy consumption by improving their knowledge and capabilities to take meaningful decisions related to energy aspects. Moreover, awareness on power quality such as supporting the end-user with analysis regarding the voltage level of power grid can also become an effective way of understanding network problems versus user appliances behavior on various voltage patterns. Our approach addresses energy data acquisition based on smart meters, to support energy awareness applications. In this paper we study aspects regarding awareness of energy production versus consumption, that enable a “follow renewables” consumption behavior, as well as awareness on power quality of delivered energy. The overall approach aims to empower customers to positively manage their energy consumption, in line with the European Union Energy Strategy that promotes energy markets with the customer having a central role.