Monday, February 13, 2017

IoT energy standards in Europe for Smart Home / Smart Grid

European governments are pretty energy conscious with a number of initiatives in the EMEA region around smart energy grids. Jotting down some of the energy standards that are relevant in Europe.

In order to successfully build a smart grid system, it is important to have standards through which home appliances can publish information on how much energy they are using in real-time, which in turn can be provided to consumers and energy management systems to manage energy demands more effectively.

Smart appliances are also technically very heterogeneous, and hence there is a need for standardized interfaces. The standardization can happen at two levels - the communication protocol level or the message-structure level.
  • SAREF (Smart Appliances REFerence) is a standard for exchange of energy related information between home appliances and the third-party energy management systems. SAREF creates a new reference language for energy-related data. 
  • EEBus - A non-profit organization for interoperability  in sectors of smart energy, smart home & building. EEBus has defined a message-structure standard called as SPINE (Smart Premises Interoperable Neutral-message Exchange). SPINE only defines message structure at the application level (OSI Layer 7) and is completely independent from the used transport protocol. SPINE can be considered a technical realization of the SAREF onthology. 
  • Energy@Home - Another non-profit organization that creating an ecosystem for smart-grid. 
  • SAREF4EE - The extension of SAREF for EEBus and Energy@Home initiatives. By using SAREF4EE, smart appliances from different manufacturers that support the EEBus or Energy@Home standards can easily communicate with each other using any energy management system at home or in the cloud.

A good presentation illustrating the current challenges in Smart Home is available here - http://www.slideshare.net/semanticsconference/laura-daniele-saref-and-saref4ee-towards-interoperability-for-smart-appliances-in-the-iot-world