About the Project

The Digital Environment Home Energy Management System (DEHEMS) project is an European Union funded project (Grant Agreement No: 224609) looking at how technology can improve domestic energy efficiency.  The project partnership includes a mix of European local authorities, private business and universities.  The intention is to develop and test a home energy management system for the home market using Living Labs in 5 cities across Europe.

The aim is to improve the current monitoring approach to levels of energy being used by households, with an overall aim of reducing CO2 emissions across Europe. The project is supported by the EU under Framework Programme 7.

DEHEMS aims to extend the current state of the art in intelligent meters, moving beyond energy ‘input’ models that monitor the levels of energy being used to an ‘energy performance model’ that also looks at the way in which the energy is used. Bringing together sensor data in areas such as household heat loss and appliance performance as well as energy usage monitoring, it offers real time information on emissions and the energy performance of appliances and services. In turn the potential exists to make changes to appliances/services remotely from the mobile phone or PC.  The system can also provide specific energy efficiency recommendations for the household.

The potential is to personalise action on climate change, and so help enable new policies such as Personal Carbon Allowances as well as supporting the move towards increased localised generation and distribution of energy.