“The World Sustainable Energy Days are one of the largest annual conferences in this field in Europe, offering a unique combination of events on sustainable energy production and use, covering energy efficiency and renewable energy sources for buildings and industry.”

The name of the exhibition stand will be “Alphaverda: Data Intensive Energy Efficiency Services for Smart Homes”.

See you there!

An Android based mobile client was implemented to provide a graphical user interface for the power management service. With this client all functionality provided by the service can easily be used to potentially reduce energy consumption. The software can be installed on any Android powered smart phone and is designed to be used without any prior knowledge about Android – so everyone should be able to use it. The design of the application is shown in the figure below.

Further research will explore how such a power management service can be used efficiently in a school context.

Following the worldwide trend of Open Government Data as well as Linked (Open) Data, REEEP launched in cooperation with our implementation partner “Semantic Web Company” the new reegle data portal today. On data.reegle.info you now can find data on stakeholders in the clean energy area as well as (energy) country profiles. This is just the first step, currently we are working on providing all data of reegle’s renewable energy and energy efficiency thesaurus for public re-use and we are plannign to continuously open up and provide more and more clean energy data on data.reegle.info. The idea of providing raw data (first mentioned by Sir Tim Berners Lee in the course of the W3C LinkedData movement) for free and unrestricted re-use perfectly fits into reegle’s idea and objectives to act as a single point of access for worldwide clean energy data (renewable energy as well as energy efficiency).

[...]

data.reegle.info follows W3C standards and recommendations for Linked Open Data as well as Open Government Data, and is implemented under the the Open Government Data License for public sector information licence.

For developers we have created a comprehensive developer guide as well as a SPARQL endpoint as the central API to the reegle.info data.

As the field of Linked Open Data / Open Government Data (Linked Government Data) is very innovative we would like to ask you for your feedback on data.reegle.info – please let us know what is useful for you and what could be useful in the future as well as if you have any problems with the system and / or any suggestions for optimisation!
Many thanks in advance!

We do hope that data.reegle.info initiates a lot of new (data) mash ups as well as innovative apps using data.reegle.info and also people that re-use the provided data for their daily work in the clean energy business!

In volume no. 9 of the PsychNology Journal (9/1, 2011, p. 55 – 72) Kerrigan et al. have presented the results of a user survey that investigates into acceptance barriers of smart metering devices among lay users. According to their research the following aspects are crucial for creating acceptance of smart metering technology among this user group:

• the familiarity of the terminology to the user; lay consumers are not expected to know symbols (such as “[!]” top signal that the meter is working properly ), codes (such as “t2” for the price rate type) or jargon (such as “instantaneous power”)
• the adequacy of the information to the users’ needs; for instance, users need to get two values and do a subtraction in order to know the consumption in the current billing period.
• the availability of a back button, since running through 24 clicks in order to see the last information, and having to go though the full series of clicks in order to see it again if by mistake one presses the button once more is not a usable design.
• the perceptual visibility of the information on the display; this can be improved by avoiding that the meter is positioned in an inaccessible point on the wall, and by increasing the lightening of the display or using a back lightened display;
• the reduction of superfluous information, since a small display forces to several steps in order to get a long or complex information. A case in point is the sentence “For information about the contract and notifications of failures please call (a telephone number) ” is divided into 6 chunks, each one requiring a click in order to progress to the next chunk. In case the meters model can still be chosen and is not already installed at the consumers’ households, then models with larger displays should be preferred.

Recently we have welcomed University of Kragujevac from Serbia as SESAME-S associate partner organization. The university is cooperating with SESAME-S company partners in the area of research in Intelligent Systems, Semantic Web and Ontology modeling.

For becoming a SESAME-S associate partner, fill out this application form and send it to info[at]alphaverda.com.

Harald Schäffler talked about a consumer study he conducted. The main points were that there is hardly any market resonance in Germany because smart grids are not interesting for energy providers. From his point of view the key factors to make such a system successful are transparency, costs, control and the social aspect.

The key points of other presentations and the panel discussion were that security is a very important factor also simplicity, transparency and automation instead of user interaction are necessary in order to gain acceptance among users. Due to the growing number of photovoltaic facilities and e-mobility solutions these should also be considered.

So to conclude, the most important aspects when designing a smart metering /smart grid system are security, ease of use and value-added services. One highlight I would like to mention was the last panel discussion moderated by Michael Kerbler which was especially informative and entertaining.

event agenda

From left to right (back row): Vladimir Pejović (eSmart), Milan Stefanović (eSmart), Peter Fröhlich (FTW), Peter Riedl (FH Hagenberg), Tassilo Pellegrini (SWC), Andreas Wöckl (eSys), Dimitri Novikov (Ezan), Sergey Aleshin (Ezan), Valery Barkov (Ezan), Anna Fensel (FTW)

From left to right (front row): Laurenz Csokor (FTW), Mirna Kojic Veljovic (eSmart), Slobodanke Tomic (FTW), Rene Mayrhofer (FH Hagenberg), Vikash Kumar (FTW)

• Users need to be informed broadly about the concrete functionalities and purposes of smart metering devices, especially with respect to ecological aspects.
• Users need transparent and clear definitions of privacy policies, especially with respect to data handling and customer profiling
• Users need concrete and relevant applications for their daily purposes
• User will just accept “intelligent” devices at maximum at marginal monthly costs and just with sufficiently low installation fees
• A higher diversification of energy prices is needed to give the users incentives for changing their behaviour towards peak-insensitive usage hours.