TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Household Electricity Bill Cut by Cell-Phone-Controlled 'Middleware'

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 01-19-10 | Comments

Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany) proposes "middleware" to monitor and control energy consumption with your mobile phone.

Green uses of cell-phone technology will be unveiled next month at the GSMA Mobile World Congress (Barcelona, Feb.15-18) which kicks off with a keynote from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and winds up with a concert by rock band Duran Duran. In between, hundreds of exhibitors will sport cell-phone innovations, including the FIT, which will be showing its green middleware solution for smarter energy consumption.

FIT predicts that consumers will voluntarily cut down on excess energy consumption when they are given the opportunity to monitor and control it. Unfortunately, today most household appliances can only be controlled by consumers when they are standing in front of them. For instance, drying your clothes at 3 a.m. might cut your monthly energy costs, but few people will take the trouble to get up at that hour to turn the dryer on. That's where Fraunhofer's middleware comes in, offering a convenient user interface that allows consumers to monitor and control the energy consumption of every device in their household, including scheduling those 3 a.m. clothes drying sessions.

FIT has designed what it calls a "plogg," which is an adapter that installs between the power outlet and the device being controlled. The plogg monitors the flow of electricity to all household devices, and reports their consumption over a wireless connection to the user's PC where FIT's "Hydra" middleware is running. Hydra can then send commands to each plogg for turning on or off devices, as well as to dim lights.

Hydra presents to users a real-time readout of all the energy being consumed by the devices in a household, and highlights the biggest energy consumers for the moment, day, week, month and year. What's more, using a cell phone, users can view the same Hydra readouts and adjust the same parameters remotely as they do when they are at home.

A cell phone can also be used to allow users standing in front of an appliance to monitor its current power consumption. The consumer uses his cell phone's camera to take a photo of the appliance, which is matched by Hydra against a catalog of photos it maintains of each device using a plogg. Hydra then sends the current energy consumption of that device to the cell phone's display.

Hydra also allows "what-if" scenarios where users can try out different power consumption combinations. For instance, consumers can ask how much energy will be saved per year by switching all the bulbs in their house to use the same low-energy fluorescent bulb in a given plogg. Hydra can also compare the energy efficiency of different devices, for instance telling users how much more energy will be consumed by playing a DVD on a Sony PlayStation 3, compared to playing it on a dedicated DVD player.