Home Energy Management System (HEMS)

• This £5m project aimed to accelerate the development of a consumer-orientated Home Energy Management System (HEMS) to give insight into consumer energy use, building and heating system performance providing a secure and flexible platform to enable others to test and develop new energy services
• The project aimed to accelerate the development of a consumer-orientated Home Energy Management System (HEMS) product with mass market appeal
• Tested in homes from Winter of 2016

ETI’s research highlighted that a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) should be a key component of a future smart energy system, but given the fact, at the time, most consumers did not willingly engage with their energy system any product solutions would need to be consumer focused if they were to be effective. Therefore this project to design an advanced HEMS was a core component of the ETI’s Smart Systems and Heat programme (now delivered by the Energy Systems Catapult) to make energy and heat consumption more consumer focused.

As part of the two year project, the system that was developed was installed and tested in homes during the winter of 2016 and the results analysed to give an insight into consumer patterns, their electricity and gas use and the building and heating system performance. This provided a significant dataset of consumer behaviours, energy use and building characterisation to develop further future products. Providing a secure and scalable platform also helped to integrate more appliances in the home and allow valuable services and applications to be developed, deployed and managed.