On the potential of Internet based energy services in Greece during cooling season

Existing advanced and sophisticated building systems combined with emerging IT technologies create the opportunities for e-based energy management. Driven mostly by the deregulation of energy market, e-based energy management systems have the potential to help both energy utilities to manage power load and reduce peak loads and end-users to reduce their consumption and possibly increase their comfort. As the real time/time-of-use price of distributed energy fluctuates over a day, significant savings can occur for both utilities and customers; there are some appliances manageable over time, in the sense that it is possible to shift their energy use in time (away from periods with peak prices) without compromising their function. This holds, for example, for heating and cooling equipment (slow distributed processes, responsible for most of the energy use in buildings). This paper describes the infrastructure for eservices under test within a European research project and present a set of e-energy services, tested and prototyped in Greece. The provided energy services are linked with the remote monitoring of environmental parameters, the remote control and actuation of cooling equipment and the on line prediction of energy consumption and environmental conditions (using Artificial Neural Networks). The services focus mainly on the cooling season, as this period presents an important potential from various points of view; energy distribution companies can importantly improve the energy management by having a prediction of the cooling energy consumption of different areas of buildings while remote control of cooling equipment during the hours of peak power demand, gives the means to effect orchestrated energy management and load shedding, as well as minimize the contingency of construction and operation of new plants or a feature danger of a black out.