Energy consumers get more insight into consumption

As part of this effort, individuals and companies are working together to make more efficient use of energy by collecting, storing and analysing detailed energy-usage information in real time from homes across the UK.

The Hildebrand monitoring system enables real-time analysis of electricity usage for households, or even for individual appliances, to help people make better decisions about energy efficiency in the home and minimise their environmental impact.

Hildebrand received funding from the Seventh Framework Programme for EU Research (FP7) for a 30-month research project that would allow stakeholders from local authorities, private businesses and universities to study energy monitoring and its effect on human behavior.

The Hildebrand project involves installing small, low-cost energy monitoring devices at groups of homes in five European cities: Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester in the UK, and Plovdiv and Ivanovo in Bulgaria.

Each of these groups form a ’living lab,’ giving the researchers access to real-world energy usage data, and allowing them to study the behaviour of individuals and their attitudes towards energy management.

Homeowners can access this information online in a format that displays their electricity usage and perform analytics, such as calculating costs against the users’ electricity tariff, or comparing their usage to the average for their group.

’In the first proof of concept we simulated three million homes sending readings once a minute and we were able to capture nearly 50,000 readings per second using only a quad-core, dual-processor Intel server. In the second, we moved to a slightly larger server and found we could deliver analytics response times of between one and three seconds for a similar load,’ said Clive Eisen, chief technology officer at Hildebrand. ’You don’t need to understand the technical details – the point is that suddenly, energy monitoring for three million homes or more became a practical proposition.’

Traditional databases struggle to deal with time-series data (’pulses’ of data arriving at regular intervals from one or more sources), because their structure makes it difficult to store and index this data efficiently.

Using IBM Informix, however, Hildebrand was able to create a single database object for each data source and now updates it with the latest readings whenever a new ’pulse’ of data arrives related to energy consumption.

According to IBM, this provides a far more manageable information structure, which makes it easier to store, extract and analyse data.