Boosting Energy Efficiency Trough Social Smart Grid Network

Project Information

Socialsmartgrid

Grant agreement ID: 739264

DOI

10.3030/739264

Project closed

EC signature date 15 December 2016

Start date 1 January 2017

End date 31 December 2018

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Secure, clean and efficient energy

Total cost

€ 1 750 097,50

EU contribution

€ 1 225 068,26

Coordinated by

FRACTALGARDEN SRL
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Socialsmartgrid (Boosting Energy Efficiency Trough Social Smart Grid Network)

Reporting period: 2018-01-01 to 2018-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Since 1995 Fractalgarden has successfully introduced in the Italian market products in the energy monitoring field. ASCOEL is an established SME with more than 20 years of experience in the design and manufacturing of microprocessor-based products. Our companies have been partners in the last years for the development of the ERMES 3.0 datalogger. With the ambition to gain visibility on the market and increase our turnover, we have decided to join capacities again to upgrade this system to a more extended solution: SocialSmartGrid. Recent studies states that the market for home energy management products and services as SocialSmartGrid is gathering momentum and its revenue is expected to grow from 528 € million in 2013 to over 3.000 M€ in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate of 15.2%. SocialSmartGrid is a ground-breaking approach to connect energy providers to their customers through internet to the Smart grids and social networks to boost their energy efficiency up to 20%. The solution is a holistic system based on an energy monitoring unit with internet router integrated which connects to an energy management cloud platform with unique additional features such as social networking, community building and ecommerce marketplace to acquire energy efficient appliances and services. SocialSmartGrid is specially oriented to households and Small and medium business. With just one gadget, our energy and telecommunication service partners will be able to offer their customers an integrated energy management service and other important energy saving and home security features.
We can offer a white label infrastructure and we can quickly adapt hardware and software to the needs of big partners.
We are a strong accelerator for those who want to quickly activate a solution of energy smart home in their customer park with their own brand.
We have integrated LoRaWAN technologies into many of our sensors and have all the application infrastructure in our datacenter. We deal directly with hardware, firmware, web app and mobile app.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We invest our efforts in overpass the initial specifications and succeeded in realizing functionalities that various market surveys and conferences on smart homes have confirmed to be of particular interest to homeowners.
We succeeded in upgrading our first energy monitoring platform (“homy”) to a beta test platform (v1), migrating our Datalogger to a Linux-based operating system and designing and developing a pilot demonstration (100 prototype units), as well as devising a Pilot Organization Plan, which manage the activities of the pilot test. The pilot test was organized in collaboration with E.ON Italia, which proved to be very collaborative and interested in experimenting with new solutions.
Furthermore, we defined our footprint on the marketing strategy, based on agreements with strategic partners. We have launched our project website where a fun video shows the potential of the infrastructure.
At the end of the second period, thanks to the first presentations of the product and the pilot test, we received the first feedback from the market and we obtained the first development jobs in the smart city that make use of the technology developed in Social Smart Grid.
The project was undoubtedly a success and we have already started to reap the rewards.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Our expectations are the development of an ecosystem of functionality that is objectively useful for users.
The main purposes are to improve home comfort, safety, energy savings (and therefore economic) plus other economic benefits deriving from other platform functions, such as purchasing groups (homy users are part of a community in which the accession of a large number of users to one or more offers of goods and services, brings considerable benefits to end users who alone could never reach).
The potential impact of our service is therefore very high thanks to the functional integration of various areas made simple by an easy-to-use app.
Also, from the social point of view, functions such as purchasing groups or social networks connected to homy, are actually moments of meeting between users, united by common objectives of energy saving and economic savings.
Since the platform is designed to be used also by large utility like E.ON with millions of customers, the multiplicative factor is very high.

homy hardware

back end home temperature and device managment

Sensor

home status and users

homy dashboard sicurezza e stato

Video screenshot

mobile dashboard

homy dashboard comfort

in house comfort