The objective of this project is to develop open protocols, data models, and reference implementations for software support of energy production, consumption, and storage in a micro-grid environment. Micro-grids are small-scale energy environments, such as individual buildings, in which energy can be produced (by solar panels, wind turbines, etc.), consumed (by A/C, lights, computers, etc.), and stored (by batteries, fly wheels, etc.). A variety of off-the-shelf hardware can be used to monitor energy production, consumption, and storage, typically by polling the devices once per minute. Preliminary studies have shown the increasing occupant awareness of energy usage can effect behavior and encourage conservation and sustainable practices. We want to develop an open software infrastructure to:

• Facilitate the understanding of patterns of energy production, consumption, and storage in a micro-grid environment.
• Provide a basis for experimentation on encouraging conservation behaviors among micro-grid inhabitants via appropriately designed information technology.
• Support experimentation on new energy production, consumption, and storage devices by providing extensible software instrumentation for gathering and analyzing data.

By "open", we envision a software infrastructure that: (a) is freely available using open source licensing and an open source hosting system; (b) is platform agnostic (runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.); (c) is language agnostic (components can be built in C, Java, Ruby, etc.); (d) uses HTTP and REST architectural principles to facilitate understanding, adaptation, and extension of data transmission and analysis protocols.

This project is sponsored in part by the University of Hawaii Renewable Energy and Island Sustainability project.