Low cost smart power metering

Modern trends, including increased electricity requirements and improvements in grid management technologies, are causing the electric industry and regulators to review how the grid is achieved. With this aim, in this paper a low cost solution for the real-time energy management in a smart grid, is presented. It provides several smart meters, which act as slaves, that continuously monitor connected loads communicating with a data aggregator via CAN bus. Through the implemented web server the users can remotely control their consumption using a web browser. To prevent external attacks, a low computational cost protection software, based on Message Authentication Code (MAC), has been implemented. The paper illustrates the hardware architecture, discusses the adopted software solutions, and is completed with an example of energy monitoring for a generic household thanks the web server.