Increasing Energy Awareness Through Web-enabled Power Outlets 

Markus Weiss and Dominique Guinard 

Rising global energy demand, increasing electricity prices, and the 
limitation of natural resources has led to increased thoughts on residential 
energy consumption. A necessary step towards energy conservation is to provide 
timely and fine-grained consumption information. This allows for users to 
identify energy saving opportunities and possibly adjust their behavior to 
conserve energy. In this paper, we present a device-level energy monitoring 
system that is based on off-the-shelf components and enables users to monitor, 
control, and compare the electricity consumption of their appliances. By 
providing a RESTful API, we seamlessly integrate the smart power outlets into 
the web and facilitate the development of extensions and novel features. We 
demonstrate this through the implementation of a web user interface and a 
mobile phone interface. We further confirm the suitability of our approach 
with the help of a 12 months pilot deployment. The results of a questionnaire 
provide insights into additional user features and the interviews conducted 
with developers who used our open sourced system illustrate the usefulness of 
the RESTful approach for the smart energy domain.