A Case for Real-World Smart Environments: The Development of a Remote Autonomous Energy Aware Monitoring System Using Next Generation Technologies

Much work is underway on issues associated with the development of tools and services to reduce worldwide energy consumption. Current trends in energy consumption show clear evidence that it is increasing whilst reserves of carbon based energy are reducing and green technologies for energy generation are yet to prove themselves. In industry, numerous instrument manufacturers support the MODBUS protocol as a means of communicating between relevant devices. In fact, there are many legacy installations of equipment capable of transmitting its energy usage via the MODBUS protocol. In this paper we introduce a means of logging energy usage data and transmitting it to a database. The motivation is that making energy users aware of their consumption can help assist them in taking informed action towards the reduction of wasted energy. We use GSM/GPRS technology, embedded KJava runtime and a bespoke Java application as the framework to email the usage data to the database. Pilot testing shows evidence of a successful transfer of usage data from the meter to a registered e-mail account.