EDP NEW completes demonstration activities in Seixal residential pilot
EDP NEW is part of the SATO project and is the leader of the demonstration activities, which include both residential and office buildings in 3 European countries. The residential pilots are located in Aalborg (DK), Milan (IT), and Seixal (PT), covering cold, intermediate, and warm climates. The goal of pilots is to perform the assessment of real-life energy use that includes the most relevant energy consuming equipment in a given building. With this, comes the possibility of optimizing energy performance of the whole building and of its energy consuming equipment.
EDP NEW, as the responsible partner for the Portuguese residential pilot in the municipality of Seixal, has completed during the month of February, equipment installations in 48 residential units, with the support of Smart Energy Lab, an affiliated party of the project, and AMES, Agência Municipal de Energia do Seixal. A wide spectrum of equipment was installed in the dwellings, namely HVAC systems, energy meters, smart plugs, platform gateways, and sensors for humidity, temperature, and CO₂ (Figure 1). The homeowners oversaw the installations of equipment, were debriefed about the goals of the project and the functioning of the equipment, provided feedback on the SATO online platform where data will be shared and signed a data consent to allow the collection and processing of energy data.
Figure 1 – SATO equipment installed in client’s houses (on top, left to right, re:dy AC smart plug and re:dy regular smart plug, smartenergy meter, and Xtel sensor. On the bottom left, re:dy gateway)
The installed smart plugs and gateways are part of EDP’s re:dy products. They were developed as part of an innovative service from EDP Comercial, which allows residential consumers to comprehensively manage all the energy in their home in real time, to reduce costs and optimize energy usage. Energy consumption data is collected from the smart energy meter that is installed in the client’s electric board (Figure 2), that communicates to the gateway (re:dy box). The gateway is coupled to the clients’ internet modem, to send data to the SATO platform. The re:dy box also communicates with the installed smart plugs (EDP re:dy plug), which are smart electrical outlets where clients plug in their appliances, to measure the energy consumption of the electrical equipment plugged in. AC Smart plugs for AC systems beyond collecting this information also allow actuation on the AC unit, namely in terms of temperature setpoint (Figure 3). Finally, the humidity, temperature, and CO₂ sensors installed were developed for SATO by Xtellio, a Danish consortium partner specialized in IoT devices and cloud-based solutions. The Xtel sensors have a built-in Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) card that communicates directly to the Xtellio and then to the SATO platform.
Installing smart energy meter at client’s electrical board.
Residential users were also asked to evaluate the SATO platform, after testing the online platform where they will check their energy consumption data and recommendations to improve their energy efficiency. Their feedback at this stage was essential to improve the online platform, as well as to fine-tune the full Self-Assessment & Optimization capabilities of the SATO platform and energy management services.
Installation of equipment at client’s apartment – checking if data is being received in the platform
