Consumer-Centric and Service-Oriented Architecture for the Envisioned Energy Internet

The Energy Internet is the vision of performing intelligent automation in the smart grid using Internet-based technologies. This vision complies with embracing the residential domain into the smart grid, since it facilitates the reuse of the existing Internet connection in the home. Stakeholders such as Energy Service Companys (ESCOs) and Distribution System Operators (DSOs) can then acquire meter data from residential homes, where the residential consumer can gain potential cost savings by using their services. However, residential consumers have concerns about their privacy when metering devices monitor home appliance usage that potentially can reveal their habits without their consent. This paper discusses architectural design challenges and presents a consumer-centric system architecture with incentives for the residential consumers, ESCOs and the DSOs to participate. The architecture is based on a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) using web services that follow the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. The ESCOs provide intelligent automation through home-oriented and grid-oriented web services that optimise for the residential home and DSO, respectively. The consumer can control the privacy enforcement through a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) that negotiates the information content of the meter data with a management entity in the cloud. OAuth 2.0 is adapted for the consumer to authorise web services to access meter data from the management entity.