By Angel Lagares-Lemos and Juan Miguel Gómez-Berbís, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.
Abstract: The households, factories, office buildings and communities can reduce their energy consumption, while maintaining the same level of activity and comfort, by identifying and avoiding unnecessary energy waste. Governments around the world are taking initiatives in this direction and also international coordinated initiatives such as the future ISO 50001. To support these plans, the general goal of the ENERGREEN project is to design and a new open information platform built on customizable, adaptive and open service-oriented architecture, providing connectivity to the energy grids and information to the users. The user of the different platform modules will interact with the energy information through intuitive user interfaces that help them save energy, while maintaining the desired comfort levels. For companies, the system will support the execution of the energy policy of the company and the management of all processes included in the ISO 50001. The system will monitor all possible elements of local production and consumption of energy, due that in order to generate energy saving advices, detail energy data are required such as: solar, fuel cells, micro-turbines, heating, cooling, lighting, ventilation, air conditioning, PC, etc. Therefore, the Energreen project will provide an innovative platform for the development of a key piece in a new generation suite of Smart Grid products. The Energreen project, through the spread of services on energy management, will encourage more energy conservation at demand side and will contribute to the achievement of low-carbon society to come. Energreen will work to increase the social awareness of the citizens in saving energy and the improvement in new and more efficient habits triggered by IT solutions.
Software Research and Climate Change 
3 comments
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April 21, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Bernd
No doubt, the idea of optimizing the energy consumption by applying intelligent systems is great. For me your focus remains unclear. Are you setting standard interfaces for relevant devices or are you focusing on the optimization itself. The scope of this project seems very broad and not achievable without significant support from the mayor vendors of the mentioned devices. Who are the mentioned stakeholders? I think it would be easier to understand your ideas, if you provide a concise example.
The abstract should be shorter and more focused. There is no significant difference between the abstract and the introduction.
April 22, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Ian Sommerville
Agree with above comment. There is a danger that we, as technical folks, focus too much on technology. There needs to be user studies to discover what is acceptable and practicable and these should inform the requirements and design of such a system.
April 23, 2010 at 3:11 pm
pipitone
I agree with both Bernd and Ian. This paper seems to me a statement of good intentions rather than any clear research proposal. But, the intention is great: an information service that provides total real-time energy usage data from a smart power grid to customers! Yes please! It’s hard not to agree with the authors that such a system would have a large impact on energy efficiency, but I’m also not very clear on what the system actually is or how useful it would be.
What I think is dearly missing from this paper is a review of the existing energy monitoring and market systems (because we are definitely not the the first ones to think up this solution), and concrete proposals for how we can begin a research program that usefully provides assistance to the people already building these systems. My concern is that whilst the intention of this project is great, the authors do not have a clear idea of what the requirements are for a project like this. For instance, in the paper the authors suggest that as part of ENERGREEN we create “an open platform architecture for the management of energy data and processes in buildings, facilities, and electronic devices”. At first glance this sounds reasonable (who wouldn’t want such a platform!) but I get no sense from the paper what this means in practice, how we researchers should go about discovering that, and if such a platform is even needed or practical given what already exists.
As Bernd and Ian suggest, proposals for how we discover who the stakeholders are, and user studies to identify the system requirements are all reasonable starting points that should appear in this paper. Because of the lack of background and specific research proposals identified in this paper, I don’t think this would make for well-focused discussion in the workshop.
I don’t have much to recommend in the way of further reading, as I’m not familiar at all with this area. For the customer interface design, a colleague suggests the following papers as potentially relevant:
At The Flick of a Switch: Detecting and Classifying Unique Electrical Events on the Residential Power Line
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74853-3_16
Effectiveness of an energy-consumption information system on energy savings in residential houses based on monitored data
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2005.02.002