Abstract
In developing countries today, population growth and the penetration of higher standard of living appliances in homes has resulted in a rapidly increasing residential load. In South Africa, the recent rolling blackouts and electricity price increase only highlighted this reality, calling for sustainable measures to reduce overall consumption and peak load. The dawn of the smart grid concept, embedded systems, and ICTs have paved the way for novel Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) design. In this regard, the Internet of Things (IoT), an enabler for intelligent and efficient energy management systems, is the subject of increasing attention for optimizing HEMS design and mitigating its deployment cost constraints. In this work, we propose an IoT platform for residential energy management applications focusing on interoperability, low cost, technology availability, and scalability. We addressed the backend complexities of IoT Home Area Networks (HAN) using the Open Consortium Foundation (OCF) IoTivity-Lite middleware. To augment the quality, servicing, reduce the cost, and the development complexities, this work leverages open-source cloud technologies from Back4App as Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) to provide consumers and utilities with a data communication platform within an experimental study illustrating time and space agnostic “mind-changing” energy feedback, Demand Response Management (DRM) under a peak shaving algorithm yielded peak load reduction around 15% of the based load, and appliance operation control using a HEM App via an Android smartphone.
Highlights
Academic Editor: Hyun-Ho ChoiThe growing energy consumption in South Africa constitutes a significant impediment to energy supply sustainability
As the gateway observation service on the IoTivity network using the mechanism is started and server is in Live Query mode, those requests are received as update events
As the gateTo evaluate the performance of our cloud-based IoTivity platform in addressing the way server is in Live Query mode, those requests are received as update events
Summary
The growing energy consumption in South Africa constitutes a significant impediment to energy supply sustainability. This situation is alarming in domestic areas, which make up a growing share of peak loads and energy wastage. The recent rolling blackouts and electricity price increase only highlighted this reality and calls for sustainable measures to reduce overall consumption [1]. In such context, the cost and complexities of grid interventions in the residential sector has limited energy utility initiatives to an awareness and educational campaign and flash addresses on digital media to address energy wastage [2]. HEMS provides consumers with feedback on appliances or equipment operation and offers an automation platform for implementing energy management strategies [3]
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