E Smart Systems

Cloud-Based Energy Management Solution Helps Companies, Municipalities & Families Lower Costs, Increase Sustainability

Business Needs:

Sustainability, the long-term maintenance of our global ecosystem through maintenance of responsibility for constant renewal and improvement of its economic, environmental and social aspects, has become a world-wide challenge and concern. The solution development team at E-Smart Systems observed several key factors that contribute to the challenge. The first was the need to publish relevant energy information to increase and improve support for smarter energy management. As an example, many organizations simply did not know whether their energy utilization was consistent with that of similar organizations, or if it was excessive. If excessive, what was causing the excess utilization? Was it wasteful and, if so, how could that waste be stopped. The second was to help create directly interactive relationships to support better overall management of energy utilization.

One key impact of the lack of information and awareness about energy consumption is inaction. Rather than making poor energy management choices, no choices that would improve utilization and better integration of renewals are being made at all by the vendors of devices, end users, and utility regulators involved in the energy sector. This includes decisions that directly impact CO2 and other harmful emissions that damage the environment.

While significant amounts of data exist that could be made available to assist with these challenges, those data must first be processed into valuable and consumable information which will support the decisions necessary to invoke the optimal actions required to correct the problems. E-Smart Systems saw an opportunity to provide this data processing to deliver the required information to the appropriate people in a way that would help them take immediate and impactful action.

Solution:

E-Smart Systems set out to apply a semantic-based data management and reasoning infrastructure using complementary partner-provided hardware solutions for onsite monitoring and data collection and published Web Services to deliver their solution to these energy management challenges.

“Alphaverda is a service platform offering great potential for service development for all energy stakeholders including notification, alarming, monitoring and the opportunity to promote their services to other stakeholders.”

– Milan Stefanovic
Program Manager
E-Smart Systems.

To accomplish this, E-Smart Systems leveraged the Microsoft Windows Azure platform to create Alphaverda (www.alphaverda.com), a platform for collecting, processing, publishing, and querying energy consumption data and establishing energy management services between consumers, providers, and managers of these utilities. The Alphaverda portal gives basic information about energy saving policies to all stakeholders in the energy system, including producers, transmitters, consumers, agencies, and manufacturers. The portal also provides extensive information regarding specific energy services – detailed energy monitoring, notifications and energy management – to organizations who are interested in lowering energy consumption.

Hardware devices deployed at customer premises perform two important functions. They collect and convey constantly updated utilization data back to Alphaverda which can then report on trends and patterns of use. Alphaverda can also alert customers when an energy utilization anomaly is occurring.

Reporting is not limited to an individual customer’s own consumption statistics. Alphaverda also publishes summary and mean utilization information that can be used by organizations to compare their own energy behaviors with those of other similar organizations to determine if their utilization is consistent with that of their peers in terms of industry, size of organization or other parameters.

Not only does Alphaverda give insight, advice, and recommendations to support energy decision-making, it also directly controls devices and provides portal interfaces to assist users in daily energy management.

Benefits:

Milan Stefanovic, Program Manager for E-Smart Systems, identifies a variety of “stakeholders” that benefit in various ways from their use of Alphaverda.

Energy Supply Companies, for example, can use alerts generated by Alphaverda to identify customers that would benefit from a specific energy consulting service and proactively promote the appropriate specialized services to each customer based on aggregated data and user profiles. They can also better manage their customers using SmartMeter reading activities.

Municipalities must maintain a wide variety of physical plant facilities each with its own unique energy requirements. Alphaverda provides core support for building control, and also delivers tools needed to investigate and resolve specific challenges at specific sites.

Corporations improve their public relations and can earn various benefits by increasing their sustainability. Alphaverda contributes by not only helping to monitor and manage utilization which can also result in reducing harmful emissions and other impacts to the environment. It also provides extensive information and resources that companies can use to institute long-term improvement projects.

Private families can benefit in many significant ways. Alphaverda automation delivers comfort and cost savings in the management of energy use in the home, and also allows individuals to monitor and read their own meter. Beyond this, in a time where the use of alternative energy sources is growing, Alphaverda can enable and manage the sale of home-produced energy back to the power utility. Stefanovic points out that the Serbian Power Utility charges consumers approximately five cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. However, if a consumer generates surplus energy using solar-panels, the utility is required by Serbian law to purchase that surplus for 20 cents per kilowatt hour. This provides tremendous incentive to implement these new energy production strategies.

Source:

Microsoft Case Study: E Smart Systems