Applying IT to Solve Societal Grand Challenges: Residential Energy Monitoring Services as the First Pillar

Society 2.0 is the next stage in the evolution of the Information Society, enabling seamless content and service interaction in support of our environment, to ease our work and life balance, and to enrich our lives. Abundant sustainable resources such as energy, water, and food, together with smart buildings, spaces and transportation are all aspects of the Society 2.0 vision. The domain of residential energy monitoring services and their supporting IT ecosystems provides a rich and challenging environment to push the limits of our current IT service models, designs, and implementation strategies. As part of HP Labs´ ongoing research into environmental sustainability we have designed and deployed a Home Energy Intelligence Service for remote monitoring and assessment of residential energy consumption patterns, overlaid by a set of energy-related advisory services. Our solution consists of a residential sensing layer, an energy cloud service that contains a number of back-end components, and a user dashboard experience. These enable our research team to explore issues around holistic and fine grained sensing, differentiated analytics, scaling of IT services, and the surfacing of insights and incentives to enable homeowners to manage and reduce their energy consumption through behavioral change.