Near real time energy monitoring for end users: Requirements and sample applications

Recent work in the Smart Grid field has concentrated on the utilities´ requirements, whereas user research on energy awareness and conservation has only been done at a relatively small scale. We attempt to bridge this gap by analyzing the requirements for a grid-wide real time energy monitoring system and combine them with requirements derived from state of the art user feedback applications, both based on the results of joint projects on the subject. We also present example applications that enable a real time system to better advise end users on their habits and administrative users to monitor the state of whole system.