MySmartMeter

Inspiration

Peak electrical load hours pose a substantial financial burden on both Dominion's customers and on Dominion's generation process. In order to quickly generate power in these times, Dominion is forced to use carbon dioxide emitting fuel to meet the demand. So in addition to high cost, these peak hours contribute to a negative environmental footprint. Currently Industrial facilities receive cash incentives to reduce energy consumption during peak usage hours. We want to bring this idea to consumers to encourage lower energy consumption with cash/prize incentives, and integrate this with the Smart-meter infrastructure currently being promoted by Dominion. This will serve multiple purposes: to reduce overall consumption saving the consumer money, to reduce and redistribute power usage during peak hours increasing reliability and reducing cost for Dominion, to decrease costs of employing meter-reader personnel, and to reduce the amount of Carbon Dioxide emissions during peak hours. This will help the customer and Dominion save money, leaving both parties happy, in addition to promoting Environmental Sustainability and PR for Dominion (a very vital aspect in contemporary industry).

What it does

MySmartMeter is an application that utilizes existing smart technologies to save the average consumer money with little effort. MySmartMeter will be synced with the customer's Smart-meter and internet connected smart devices, and allow customer interaction with the meter. Smart-meter data will be given to the customer in an easily digested manner, that focuses on accumulating "Peak Points", which are allotted to the customer when they reduce their power consumption in peak demand hours. "Peak Points" will hold monetary value and can be accumulated and redeemed for electricity bill credit or prizes/cash (similar to credit card rewards points). Peak Point monetary value will be given by Dominion based on a metric that reduces cost margins for the customer and Dominion, while driving profit margins for Dominion. The app will analyze peak Dominion usage hours and offers customers synced device use options (via notifications) to reduce power consumption for points. It will utilize internet connected smart home devices to remotely and automatically reduce the consumer's power consumption with minimal customer interaction and effort, while redistributing Dominion's power consumption and reducing fossil fuel emissions during peak hours by approximately 8.2 tons of CO2/kWh. The additional cost benefits for Dominion include the reduction of needed field technicians to check meters; the synced Smart-meter and MySmartMeter system allows for the remote collection of power use data by Dominion, so a person would no longer be needed to physically come to the meter to check it, cutting the cost of hiring personnel to do so. Due to the wireless capabilities of the app-system interface, this will also allow the app to detect outages. The app can also be integrated to allow the customer to pay their utility bill through it's platform. This app can be integrated to be a multidimensional platform to give the customer (and Dominion) more convenient energy and fiscal management.

How we designed it

Seeing is often believing for many of us. For the customer MySmartMeter allows you to interact with the Smart-meter, enabling you to see real time energy savings and to adjust your device usage to maximize potential savings. MySmartMeter utilizes a Smart-meter and The Internet of Things to collect and utilize data, and operate electrical devices remotely in order to more efficiently use electricity. The goal of the app is to redistribute power consumption to off peak hours, and will utilize notifications, active, and reactive programming to suggest potential cost savings such as charging your phone at a different hour, automatically shutting off your A/C unit if on when a peak hour begins, or allowing you to turn it off yourself whenever you wish. The team envisions the majority (if not all) of Dominion's customers to eventually utilize MySmartMeter and participate in the Peak Point program. This would necessitate customers to fully transition onto Smart-meters and utilize a significant amount of smart devices. This program would serve the almost 6 million utility and retail energy customers of Dominion and facilitate efficient energy management that is economical for all participants and promote a healthier environmental footprint. Eventually when power distribution is finally fully transitioned from fossil fuels to alternative sources, this program will still be applicable and effective for energy management and peak power distribution. Once this is implemented, it will revolutionize energy management as currently known and develop a mutual partnership between power supplier and power user in responsible energy use. Dominion saves money from the reduced use of expensive means of generation and in grid maintenance/repair from grid overload in peak hours, while reducing CO2 emissions. The customer wins, Dominion wins, the environment wins.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges the team faced included creating a prototype app, as none of the members have a strong computer science or coding background; we're a team of mechanical engineers. Even with this limitation, our team was able to learn very basic means of coding for demoing our product in the limited time given. Because of our limitation of demoing an in-depth prototype, a big focus of our presentation was formulating a very articulate and real-world applicable concept that incorporates an incentive program with an app. If this project were to win and be adopted by Dominion as a program of their own, I have no doubts that they can find the best coders in the world to make a product such as this. Finding data and statistics for many things was quite challenging. Calculating estimates for power consumption, such as kWh use per household, customer costs, and customer savings required a lot of iterating and ate up a large portion of effort and time, however we we're able to accomplish this. While the emphasis for this event was producing an app, our background in Mechanical Engineering offered us valuable insight and understanding in the current needs of electrical power generation/distribution, and as such allowed us to target our product on a need that is very substantial in contemporary times.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of identifying a very vital and applicable need in the current market and resource allocation. The product and program offered in this project has legitimate potential to revolutionize energy management from both a macro and micro scale, benefiting both distributors and users. Given recent trends in technology, it is almost certain that some form of this product will exist in the future. We want to lead innovation, not follow!

What we learned

As a team of only mechanical engineers, we found the problem intiially to be challenging and out of our comfort zone. Stepping out of that comfort zone to create an app allowed us to learn a ton of new material that we would not otherwise have been exposed to. We learned a lot about the current state of power generation/usage, especially as it pertains to a large scale distributor such as Dominion. We learned about power policies, and of other projects similar to ours (but not as fully integrated for the user and supplier).

We also learned a lot of technical information regarding computer science and app development. As a team we researched and learned more about app wireframes, prototying, Smart app API and how these devices analyze and report their data.

What's next for MySmartMeter

Ideally we would like to see our app implemented on the devices of all customers who have Smart-meters. While currently a certain denominator of customers are reluctant to install/use Smart-meters, we believe that the transparency and easy access of data with the app in addition to the savings customers will get would be a good motivator in propelling this system to prominent use.

Built With

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