Beywatch

BeyWatch, which can be resolved as Building EnergY Watcher, is a research project trying to find out how to lower external demand for electric power by households. Project has funding from Seventh Framework Programme.
BeyWatch
Efficient energy consumption is a key factor to Europe’s ambitious goals for sustainable development and activities related to air pollution and climate shifting. However, especially during the summer period, the complete electricity distribution network in Southern Europe is working under extremely high loads. Moreover, global climate scenarios show that the average temperature in EU Member States is likely to rise by 0.3-0.7°C in the next 10 years, and will continue to increase until at least the middle of the century. The probability of extreme temperatures will rise accordingly and there will be corresponding demand from building users for the installation of cooling systems in homes and workplaces, further increasing energy consumption and surcharging the electricity distribution network.
In order to tackle the increasing electricity demand, a number of solutions for efficient energy consumption, generation of energy from renewable sources, and new power distribution business models for active energy control have been considered and some of them have been even pushed via regulations in national and European level. For example in Spain, in August 2007, it was decided to replace all electricity meters in order to allow discrimination on the hourly rates of energy in such a way that users could tune their consumption pattern and contracts to the lower rates provided by the utility at given times of the day.
The basic issue in energy control is the interactive monitoring of the various energy consumption elements and consumer electronic devices, together with the possibility to intelligent tackle on the house and building energy consumption. By scheduling and controlling the electronic devices operation, BeyWatch aims to minimize power distribution peaks, balancing energy load in power distribution networks and ultimately achieving predictable large-scale energy-consumption profiles. Moreover, the BeyWatch CPS system will not only operate at home level, but even introduce flexible reverse power generation/ distribution business models.
Energy Efficiency Concept & Objectives

a) Technologies for very low-cost white goods’ power consumption. The last couple of years, white goods are already categorized in consumption energy classes. It is needed to study and invent technologies and techniques to offer significantly reduced power consumption and much more efficient power control of a new generation of intelligent energy-aware white goods. Moerover, new approaches to the energy control and saving problem are needed through detailed modelling and interactive control of the operational parameters of the energy-consuming devices; modelling and control that goes well beyond the simple ON/OFF operation, and incorporates ultra-low power standby mode, power-efficient controlled operation e.g. ultra-low power motor control, removal/reduction of the heating phases from the white goods by using hot-water available from solar energy, and sophisticated operational profiles for each device under control.
b) Mechanisms and standards for in-home ultra low-cost communications There are already off the self products and standards and the most appropriate technology and protocol for seamless, reliable and ultra low-cost in-home communication and control of white goods and consumer electronic devices have to be selected. The evaluation and validation should include both powerline and wireless media and protocols, proposed by the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) for machine to machine (M2M) communications. Moreover, BeyWatch will extended the OSGi platform and the UPnP standard mechanisms for automatic energy-aware devices discovery and plug’n’play operation.
c) Intelligent personalized energy-management/control and small-scale power demand balancing platform. Different users have different priorities, preferences, needs and consider the energy commodity from different viewpoints. In order to motivate the users and achieve efficient energy balancing, without breaking the customers’ loyalty and satisfaction, an intelligent metering/remote control platform is needed able to capture and model the user behaviour and habits, generate user profiles, control devices operation and enable energy saving, based on personal preferences. The user will have the option to bypass the automatic generated profile, configure manually the system and select the sequence that the devices will be activated/deactivated or change operational mode. By providing a detailed analysis of the consumption pattern, the user would be able to interactively monitor the consumption of each device, in both operational and standby mode, and thus take decisions on what to do: e.g. tune his contract, use on/off switched gadgets to turn-off appliances whenever they are not used (inefficient standby mode power), control operation in case of intelligent energy-aware devices.
d) Small scale renewable energy resource integrated with home network. The opportunity of strongly reduce energy consumption and CO2 emission at home and country level needs to be investigated by integrating an combined photovoltaic and solar (CPS) panels, which produces energy and hot water using a small scale RES. The integration of such CPS system in the BeyWatch network will offer two more levers (local energy production and hot water) for energy management in order to maximize energy savings and environmental savings at home and at country level. Moreover, during light hours (thus including really peak hours), it will operate as a grid network of RES and the generated electrical energy will be fed to the electricity network, introducing discounts at the house electricity bill or even a reverse power generation/distribution business model. It is important to note that the majority of distribution network peaks and overloads have been measured at southern European countries, during summer, noon hours (especially due to professional activities and air-conditioning operation), while ironically, these are exactly the hours with the greater sunlight. Producing and consuming in parallel the electrical energy or feeding the electricity network will significantly lower the CPS battery requirements, while storing hot water for latter usage in white goods is much simpler.
e) Modelling and medium-scale control of power distribution. In the business sense, the creation of original energy supply models are needed. Moreover, in co-operation with service provision companies, solutions for controlling the energy consumed outdoors, in public or private areas are needed. For example most access network equipment (i.e. GSM/3G/DVB-T, DSLAM, WiFi, WiMAX etc.), is fully operational or in an inefficient standby mode all night long, consuming a lot of energy, while in most cases it does not serve any customers. By providing a detailed analysis of the consumption pattern in a square or a neighbour, BeyWatch will allow the energy supplier companies to balance the energy consumption peaks, by comprehensive power demand scheduling and reduce the need for out-of-schedule power imports from neighbouring countries, while by efficiently tuning and controlling idle networking equipment, service providers will achieve large reduction in the consumed energy.
f) Business Support System (BSS) applications that will help the users and providers to reach contracts that would benefit both parties and will serve the user to take easy action on energy savings based on the provided information. The BSS system will allow the user to identify the power consumption pattern of his premise in such a way that he would be able to adopt measures to diminish the energy consumption by changing his consuming patterns (timing) and use a home automation system (actuators and networking) to shut down unnecessary appliances automatically on the fly. Moreover the BSS analysis tools will provide means to tune the contract between the users and the providers according for example to timing scheduling.
At building, square or neighbour level, service centres, based on new business models and flexible contracts, will be able to reduce the power consumed by certain types of appliances, depending on other higher priority demand; thus resulting in a smooth energy-consumption profile across wide geographical regions. As far as the homeowner is concerned, we foresee that motivated by personalised contracts and highly reduced electricity bills, he will subscribe to the service, and accept the automatic scheduling of some of his/her home-appliances. Under this model the project will study and evaluate the benefits to the user, as well as to the energy and service supplier, suggesting an innovative service beneficial for all parties.
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"BeyWatch" is a research project funded under the European FP7 that aims to offer a solution to the above problems. For more details please refer to BeyWatch project web page:

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