New Home Solution Reduces Energy Consumption, Costs
Cisco just unveiled a Home Energy Management Solution featuring a Home Energy Controller (CGH-100) along with Cisco Energy Management Services that, when provided by utilities to their customers, are designed to help consumers securely and reliably gain insight into, and easier control over, their energy use.
The Home Energy Controller is a countertop touchscreen display. It combines networking capabilities with applications for energy management. With it, you can view and control information on thermostats, intelligent sockets and power strips, and smart appliances such as refrigerators and water heaters.
The Home Energy Management (HEM) solution provides updated energy and budgeting information to help you optimize home energy use. With the HEM, you can gain visibility into household energy usage and control how energy is utilized.
Solutions for the Home
- The Home Energy Controller coordinates the variety of networks in the home and supports associated networking protocols, such as ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Encoder Receiver Technology (ERT).
- With the Cisco Home Energy Management Solution, utilities will be able to extend the benefits of their Smart Meter deployments by providing home owners with more detailed energy control and management, down to the appliance level. Customers and utilities can coordinate on new pricing and demand-side management services, enabling home automation for energy management.
- Cisco is also announcing hosted Energy Management Services, which utilities can use to manage data from thousands of homes while integrating with their back-end applications. These complement Cisco's existing service offerings to help utilities plan, build and run a converged communications infrastructure for automating the Connected Grid.
- The Cisco Home Energy Management Solution will be deployed by innovative utility customers such as Duke Energy, with which Cisco has a strategic collaboration to advance Smart Grid technology.
- Studies show that technology can promote better energy management by consumers. IDC found that customers reduce overall energy use by 4 to 15 percent when they receive real-time feedback on power consumption. Also, according to a study by Zogby International, 74 percent of Americans are likely to change their energy use if they are given the technology solutions to do so.
- The Home Energy Controller is designed as a global solution but will be first available in North America beginning this summer. It is part of Cisco's new Connected Grid portfolio, an end-to-end approach to the smart grid, within which substation automation technologies were announced in May to help utilities better manage electricity transmission and distribution.
