Energy consumption and The Internet of Things

Could The Internet of Things finally change our attitudes and the way we consume energy?

The smart home you dreamed of

Each morning, the lights in our house slowly turn on, underfloor heating makes sure the bathroom floor isn’t too harsh and two pieces of perfectly toasted bread pop out of the toaster. The Internet of Things is alive and well, more of us are joining its data-led eco system every day without even knowing it.

Nest is now a household name, and so too are the wearables like the UP3 and Moto 360 watch that work with the IOT to create a more harmonious experience. Behind all this lifestyle wizardry, the tech industry has been working tirelessly to make devices do more, with more power in less time. Laptops, mobile phones, tablets, wearables all got an injection of steroids to keep up with the demand of the modern consumer. Your phone struggles to keep up with the amount of power you require — it’s now a normal, subconscious thought that you need to make time for another location to charge your phone before it dies and presume the world will swallow you up with it.

No wonder we’ve coined it the ‘always on’ society.

Behind the scenes

The truth is, the internet connected home is hungry for power — our house has solar panels, good insulation, even its own kill switch and whilst all the home automation features we’ve created are designed to decrease our energy consumption, they’re almost doing quite the opposite.

In our case, the house is fully fitted with Philips Hue — each bulb has its own purpose, colour and time to do a different thing, whether the trigger is based upon time, weather, geolocation, season, activity or mood. Each Philips Hue light bulb also acts as it’s own independent beacon and is fitted with a wireless chip which all feed into Hue hubs (one hub is limited to a certain number of bulbs). The result? Potentially 40–50 wi-fi connected devices all using small amounts of power at the same time, regardless of whether they’re off or on — and that’s just the lighting. These small amounts of power — leakages, could be used to power other devices or perform useful actions, but at the moment, there isn’t a clear solution.

Running a month on month test using smart devices vs. non-smart devices (including Nest) — the smart devices used with the best intentions more than doubled our energy consumption.

Solving a problem

There are also a few suggested fixes to reducing the energy consumption of your smart devices, like turning off devices at the mains switch — but this does slightly defeat the object of running a smart home.

Creating more efficient hardware

Some chip makers like Psikick are working to solve the consumption issues in smart devices — but signs of it coming to a device near you are long off, let alone integration with those internet connected air conditioning units you can buy on the high street.

Whilst these kinds of in-device solutions seek to ensure there is 0% wastage of energy (using surplus energy to perform useful activities), there’s also plenty of questions to be asked about how the energy providers are responding to our ever-growing hunger for more.

Changing attitudes, creating cleaner energy

Smart homes are slowly growing up from an age of novelty ‘smart’ items to actual use. Smart fridges and toothbrushes are already on the market — actually Alice Truong reported that,

“Americans expect to first upgrade their thermostats and security systems, but look more than five years out, and smart fridges will be the big winners.”

More smart fridges than fitness trackers — and that in itself is precisely the problem with changing the way consumption is perceived. Self indulgence in the way we use our devices, the way we exercise, eat food and generally go about our lives limits us to really only make a relatively small change. The data from your watch, phone, toaster, kettle, fridge and lightbulb is a closed loop — but what if energy companies had a better perspective of how we used these devices?

Put aside the assumption that an energy company will use this data to it’s own benefit, with a change in attitudes, the way we use that data and the way the energy is produced in the first place — open data from The Internet of Things might just be the magic sauce.

There isn’t really an easy fix for a problem which ultimately follows Moore’s Law, but there are certainly three things we all need to consider,

1. Be smart with smart devices: It’s easy to be very lazy in a smart home — don’t fall into that trap. It’s ‘smart’, but not artificial intelligence.
2. Open the data loop: Personal data is yours to own, but if it can benefit society, consider ways to share things you notice and eventually consider the possibility, that your data could be used on the grid to do good as well.
3. Clean energy is the only route: Naturally, we’ll always demand and consume more energy, so unless we can radically change the way it’s produced, why bother?