EPA Has Aggressive August Target Date for Smart Home Energy Star Specification
EPA is targeting August for releasing the final version of the first Energy Star specification on smart home energy management systems (SHEMS), said the agency in a Friday stakeholder meeting webcast from CTA's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. The Draft 1 comment period closes May 3, with Draft 2 scheduled for June, followed by a four-week comment period and the final draft in July. The specification, method and data template will be developed together, it said.
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The SHEMS program's goal is to recognize smart home system packages that save energy and deliver cost savings and convenience by shutting off or powering down equipment when no one is home, limiting standby power of connected devices and providing feedback about the energy impact of users' settings. SHEMS is designed to evolve “with a rapidly changing market” as consumers add smart home devices to their networks.
The EPA hopes to guide energy characteristics of smart products and systems, explore system models and ways to work with service providers, and push energy-efficient behaviors and practices in the connected home market.
Touting Energy Star’s reputation with consumers, Taylor Jantz-Sell, lighting lead, said more than 90 percent of American households recognize the Energy Star label, nearly 85 percent understand what it means and 45 percent purchased energy Star-labeled products in the past year, citing a 2017 study. Of the latter, 74 percent said the Energy Star label influenced their decision to buy. Smart home is an important trend to pay attention to because it’s going to change the way people use products and energy in their home, she said.
Among the new terms to come out of SHEMS working groups are “package,” used to describe a combination of devices and services managing the energy use of connected devices in the home. A package includes software-as-a-service using a cloud-based algorithm, a device and a service provider that will have a legal arrangement with EPA for the use of the Energy Star brand and certification mark for marketing purposes. In typical Energy Star collaborations, EPA has a relationship with the manufacturer representing the consumer brand; under SHEMS, the consumer brand could be a service provider. Companies that provide infrastructure are important to the process but would not be the Energy Star partner, said Jantz-Sell.
The term "platform" describes the features the brand provides to the homeowner: security, home awareness, energy management, entertainment and lighting packages, for example, said Jantz-Sell. "Installation" refers to an individual home and what consumers have done in the home with one or multiple platforms, she said. EPA will certify the package, not the installation.
The minimum configuration for an Energy Star SHEMS package is a smart plug, two smart lights, an Energy Star thermostat that can detect temperature and an Energy Star-recognized SHEMS service. Packages that meet documentation criteria will be certified and appear on the Energy Star website. Homeowners may choose to add smart home features to the basic configuration, including cameras, TV, water heaters and electric vehicle chargers.
A Wi-Fi router is not considered part of a SHEMS system because it’s assumed to be in the home already, said Abigail Daken, Energy Star technical lead. If there’s a hub that wouldn’t be in the home without the SHEMS system, it would be considered part of the system, she said, giving the example of an alarm panel that offers security as well as energy management.
Definitions of automatic actions coming out of an occupancy working group last fall include explicitly generated actions initiated by a user through a “hard trigger” such as a schedule, a rule or action via an app or voice assistant; an implicitly generated (soft trigger) action such as those based on occupancy without direct user input; and a hybrid action where the service recognizes an opportunity for energy savings and sends a message that the user has to either decline or accept.