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BeyWatch Concept & Research Areas

For a short overview of the Beywatch project download the Beywatch in a nuthsell presentation.

Please also refer to the Beywatch Glossary for detailed definitions of the most common Beywatch terms, as well as the note on the methodology used for validation.

BeyWatch overall vision

Energy is essential in almost every aspect of our lives and global emissions are having severe impacts on our climate and the global economy. We face two long-term energy challenges:

tackling the global climate change by reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and
ensuring secure, clean and affordable energy, as most countries become increasingly dependent on imported fuel (oil or gas).

According to the World Energy Outlook the global energy demand is expected to be more than 50% higher in 2030 than today, with energy related greenhouse gas emissions around 55% higher.

In this context, BeyWatch actively supports the European Commission’s proposals to save 20% of the EU’s energy consumption through improved energy efficiency by 2020.

The starting point of the BeyWatch energy policy is to save energy by making users aware of their energy expenses and enabling them to intelligently control the home energy consumption (both hot water and electricity energy). As a second step, BeyWatch aims to efficiently distribute the home preserved/spare electricity energy at neighbouring level, allowing for electricity load balance and flexible electricity energy consumption contracts. Improving the energy efficiency of homes and neighbourhoods, BeyWatch aims to reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the energy bills.

BeyWatch focus

According to the European Environment Agency statistics, the households’ energy consumption has increased by 17.4 % between 1990 and 2003 in EU. Energy saving policies currently in place are expected to reduce electricity consumption on a year by year basis. Nevertheless these policies seem not to be sufficient to reach European governments aims and better planning of energy consumption is required.

Households’ energy consumption is a large percentage of the overall energy consumption. If we try to analyse the energy consumed by households, heating followed by water warming and household electricity are the major energy consumption categories. Moreover, the fridge, the washing machine and the dishwasher are among the major household electricity burdens covering more than 50% of the average electricity energy consumption. BeyWatch is focus on providing solutions that will lower both the energy consumed for warming water and the electricity energy consumed for the fridge, the dishwasher and the washing machine.

In this context, BeyWatch aims to design, develop and evaluate an innovative, energy-aware, flexible and user-centric solution, able to provide interactive energy monitoring for white goods, intelligent control and power demand balancing at home, block and neighbour level.

BeyWatch proposed solution combines innovation in six areas:

BeyWatch Concept & Objectives

BeyWatch's solution to this problem is based on:

minimizing white goods' and consumer electronic devices' energy consumption
balancing energy distribution
thus saving energy and reducing the service cost of the power distribution network

The basic issue in energy control is the monitoring of the various energy consumption elements and devices, as well as the scheduling of their operation in order to minimize peaks, balance loads, and ultimately achieve predictable large-scale energy-consumption profiles. BeyWatch aims at the development of a user-friendly/consumer-centric interactive platform, for the control and scheduling of operation of energy-consuming appliances and service providers' access equipment. The application of BeyWatch will result in a much more balanced energy-consumption profile, and in considerable energy conservation gains, at local (flat, home, office or single-building) level, as well as for larger geographical region (large buildings, squares and neighbours). The project will implement a distributed appliance control system that will present options for optimizing appliances' operation and scheduling of events. It will also be able to act automatically in a single-building level depending of the model of the building embedded in the controller. One of the most important results will be the incorporation of the system in a large-scale energy consumption smoothing and power demand planning system, as well as the cooperation with external service centres that will allow the remote reprogramming of the controller with different models, profiles, and operational parameters.

architecture

BeyWatch proposed Hierarchical Network Architecture

It is important to note that BeyWatch will not implement from scratch all these components and modules, but will utilise or be based on existing products and pre-products already available as background research & development or experience from the consortium members.

BeyWatch Qualified Objectives

In more details, the following qualified objectives are foreseen:

Study and specify the energy consumption and power demand models
Design and prototype three ultra-low power consumption white-products
Specify applicable services and develop the interconnection methods, the machine-to-machine (M2M) interfaces and the primitive-based communication techniques to allow communication-level ubiquitous networking and applicability of offering advanced energy-management and control services, bundled with other "smart-home" and "smart-building" services
Design and develop the BeyWatch "Agent" platform. This will be an HGi based, sophisticated, yet low-cost monitoring/remote-control platform, integrating both an intelligent electricity metering device, a remote-managed appliances/white-goods controller and a communication module
Design and implement an intelligent user-oriented software “Agent”
Design and implement the BeyWatch "Supervisor" system. This will be an open and distributed system/platform for the management and control of energy consumption and power demand at a local/square or urban geographical level.
Optimize, prototype and integrate an innovative combined photovoltaic/solar (CPS) system
Study, analyse, evaluate and validate the results, as well as the conduction of case studies and business models for the wider adoption of the platform and the proposed services
Participate and contribute in standardization efforts, special guidelines and regulations for the monitoring and control of energy consumption and power demand, aiming at the suppression of peaks and smooth out of consumption.

standards

BeyWatch contribution to standard bodies

Note on the methodology used for validation

The methodology used for user tests is called CDI – Customer-Driven Innovation, developed in Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo in order to guarantee that new products and services will integrate customer desirability, technology feasibility and also business viability. These three pillars are needed for the creation of successful products and services, as it is in the intersection between them where the company will find business innovation and customer delight.

Desirability implies understanding the customer. There are many different approaches for energy efficiency services but only those that will establish a natural and easy relationship with the customer will be massively adopted and used, leading to the pursued saving and demand balancing effect demanded by current policies and utilities’ needs.

Feasibility: Applying new technology is normally very attractive but the technology needs to be mature enough so as to be stable, transparent for the user, and easily integrated by the market (cost efficient, open and interoperable). In home M2M technologies chosen in BeyWatch are WiFi (for the communications between the refrigerator and the Agent platform) and ZigBee (for communications between the Agent and the rest of home appliances managed until now: CPS system, washing machine, dishwasher, smart meter and energy-aware smart plugs – BeyWatch watchers that make possible the control ON/OFF and energy measurement of legacy electric appliances).

Viability: Successful services have to generate revenue (societal, economic and environmental). Applied to BeyWatch, viability means:

Economic benefit for the user: spend less in the electricity bill.
Economic benefit for the utility operator: better use of the distribution grid - loads balancing in order to avoid demand peaks, and thus decreasing the use of electricity when production price is higher.
Economic benefit for the telecommunications operator: adding value to broadband connectivity.
Societal and environmental benefit: preserve the environment, reduction of greenhouse gasses emissions; ease the integration of distributed renewable energy sources, etc.

Framework for delivering Customer-Driven Innovation
Customer-Driven Innovation methodology establishes a framework for innovation in products and services: it consists of an iterative process that starts by getting insights (discovering hidden needs by using different techniques for ideation), creating a concept (normally a working prototype that can be showed to customers to result in a detailed list of requirements on how the product or service should be). The conceptualization phase includes the final user as an essential partner for new products and services creation. The last phase is the delivery of the product. With the support of an interdisciplinary team, this integrates experts in usability, interaction design, software developers, quality assurance experts and the customer.

Comments

"ICTs as leverage technologies for energy efficiency"
Asunción Santamaría Universidad Politécnica de Madrid - CeDInt

"Very nice site!"
Pharm GE

"Red Eléctrica de España has a strong commitment with Demand Side Management and Energy Efficiency and fully supports this projects objectives"
Susana Bañares Hernandez Red Electrica de España

"As a utility company in Spain, we consider this project as an enormous contribution to solve the challenges that are faced with in this sector during the next century."
Antonio Castellanos ENDESA Network Factory

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ICT for sustainable homes

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October 24-25, 2011