Smart plugs: A low cost solution for programmable control of domestic loads

Abstract

Abstract-Balancing energy demand and production is becoming a more and more challenging task for energy utilities. This is due to a number of different reasons among which the larger penetration of renewable energies which are more difficult to predict and the meagre availability of financial resources to upgrade the existing power grid. While the traditional solution is to dynamically adapt energy production to follow the timevarying demand, a new trend is to drive the demand itself by means of Direct Load Control (DLC).In this paper we consider a scenario where DLC functionalities are deployed at a large set of small deferrable energy loads, like appliances of residential users. The required additional intelligence and communication capabilities may be introduced through smart plugs, without the need to replace older "dumb" appliances. Smart plugs are inserted between the appliances plugs and the power sockets and directly connected to the Internet. An open software architecture allows to abstract the hardware sensors and actuators integrated in the plug and to easily program different load control applications.

Smart Plugs: Paradigms and Applications in the Smart City-and-Smart Grid

“…Standby losses in electrical devices are very much the concern with respect to the electricity bills in terms of energy losses [34][35][36][37]. Most appliance users tend to leave the device on standby; thereby switching off only a part of the electronic components.…”

“…At present, the standby losses still need to be addressed in day to day life, where the number of appliances grows exponentially as compared to the tiny growth rate of energy being generated. Mohanty of the Agence de I'Environnement et de la Maîtrise de I'Énergie (ADEME-French Environment & Energy Management Agency) has pointed out the energy losses incurred on a daily to yearly basis due to standby losses in home appliances and office equipment [37]. The survey has also quantitatively measured the losses for several countries as well as various types of appliances.…”

Analysis of Smart Power Sockets Implementation

“…SSoc implementation is usually based on a low power embedded microcontrollers (MC) [2], [4], [5], [7]. Indeed, the functionality including all layers of wireless stack, device control and digital processing of measurement results is difficult to achieve without a programmable or application specific device.…”

A Residential House Comparative Case Study Using Market Available Smart Plugs and EnAPlugs with Shared Knowledge

“…Smart plugs enhanced innovation and have opened the door to new possibilities, such as remote-control using energy management systems. Reference [6] explored the possibilities of integrating smart plugs for programmable control using the message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) with local and remote control. In Reference [7], a smart plug for energy management is proposed where the controllable resource is manually identified.…”