The project aims to scale and deliver to a cloud environment a highly advanced analytical software solution, which will analyse data from Smart Meters & Customer Access Devices (CADs) and detect up to 12 appliances from a single stream of energy data to provide highly personalised energy insight & actionable advice. The solution will be trialled in up to 50K UK households and its effectiveness assessed through analysing changes in energy consumption and improvements in the relationship between the customer and their energy company. ONZO, a world leader in energy data analytics, will lead the analytics development, whilst a major UK energy supplier will be selected through a tender process during the project to manage customer interaction and hardware deployment. The two businesses will collaborate with Imperial College who will undertake rigorous academic appraisal to assess the solution’s effectiveness. New analytics services will be offered to customers so they can take action to reduce their energy usage with an objective of saving 5-8% on their energy bills.

Awaiting Public Summary

Project Hydra is designed to bridge the gap between smart metering and telecare, exploring ways to utilise the same infrastructure and investment to deliver two key benefits to the UK population for a single cost. Governments globally are setting roll-out targets for smart meters, resulting in a new communications path to every home. In an innovative approach, Project Hydra will explore the future potential of this communication infrastructure to enable patients to send their health data directly to their physicians, carers or family members. This will be achieved by wirelessly sending information on health issues, such as a person’s weight and blood pressure, to many health care professionals via the smart grid infrastructure. Regular monitoring and frequent data transfer from a patient’s home will not only improve the quality of healthcare provision, but will mean that both patients and healthcare professionals will be able to avoid the cost and inconvenience of hospital or house visits. Our applications will return health data over the ZigBee home area network and advanced smart metering infrastructure using Continua Alliance protocols and secure Java Card smart card technology. Hydra is developing a technology that is effective, simple to use and allows interoperability between devices. The Project opens up opportunities for more than just healthcare applications.

The ECRIS project will deliver the first high-performance behavioural energy-efficiency platform for reducing energy wastage in buildings. This will be commercialised as flexible, user friendly controls and displays backed by novel agent-based inferencing and learning systems to help users make energy-saving decisions. These decisions involve day-to-day energy use and investment in energy efficiency measures. This will lead to an estimated 25% net energy saving, almost twice the performance of competitive product. The principal innovations in this project are the development of agent-based technologies and best practice energy communications design to drive energy efficiency.