A Distributed Energy Monitoring and Analytics Platform and its Use Cases

Abstract

We present Emonix, a distributed, low-cost system for monitoring and analyzing energy consumption patterns in buildings. Emonix is designed with our custom energy sensing hardware and integrated communication units to be efficiently mounted in breaker panels of buildings. In contrast to plug-based monitoring systems, this approach is less intrusive to users because it does not intrude on their physical space, yet it still provides fine-grained real-time energy data in both space and time. The Emonix hardware platform is open, modular, and extensible. It provides an accessible data and configuration API for users, and we believe it is useful to the broad community. To demonstrate the usefulness of this platform, we have deployed this infrastructure on two campus dormitories covering 60 rooms and 120 residents. We have been operating this infrastructure as an energy monitoring service for the residents for more than four months to help them understand their consumption patterns at different timescales. Our results indicate significant temporal variations in energy consumption patterns at different time scales, and that a small fraction of occupants can consume a disproportionately large amount of energy in such buildings.