 So, the next lightning talk is on energy and energy grids. Please welcome our speaker. Hi, my name is Nico Rieke. I'm going to talk something about energy data, why it's important for you. My background is electrical engineering. I studied that. And for the last four and a half years, I've been building on an energy data transmission platform, which is mostly decentralized. It's called HelloData. It's in the Netherlands. And I think it's all, you can all use energy data some way, one way or another. Because it's important, firstly, because it's a large part of every consumer's bills. So there's a lot of optimization you can do. And secondly, because it's very influential in terms of it says something about your behavior. This is a daily pattern of consumer's usage. You say they are sleeping, just refrigerate using some energy. Then they wake up, they use energy. Then during the lunch, maybe they heat up something in the microwave. And they come back, they watch television. Here they do the washing. Here afterwards, when you go to bed, they do the dishes. So there's a lot of things you can do with energy data in potential, as long as you know how to use it. And that's why I'm giving this talk. So traditionally, this is the electrical grid. We're generating power plants and it's fed all the way down to industry and residential consumers. And we need to build the energy we deliver. And we build ideally barrels of oil or amounts of energy. But there's a difference between energy in a barrel and flow, energy flowing. And if you take it to integrate it over time, so you have energy flowing, at a certain point you'll have a volume of energy. And that's the difference between, for example, in energy you have kilowatts, which is the flow, the flow of energy, the amounts rushing in. And kilowatt hours, which is a volume of energy. This is something to look out for. And especially in billing, we're interested in the amount of energy we delivered. So on the left are the internals of a gas meter, which are basically two containers, two lungs pumping up gas into the other. So we know in pieces of gas how much is delivered. On the right we have a disk, which is for the electricity meter, which is voltage and current, which results into power, which is flow. And that spins the wheel on the meter and thereby registers the amount of energy we delivered. So the difference in measurement. But that's not enough, because if as a consumer we only register our numbers every year, in the meantime, there's going to be real, significant energy storage. So if there's an imbalance, we have to solve it right away, the supply and demand. That's a real-time struggle that's going on in the grid. So we have grid operators who maintain the stability of the grid, supply and demand. And associated with that is a market. And so, while back, decades back, they came up with a standard and the OBIS codes listed below define very specific measurement points you might be interested in. If you're going towards smart meter energy data, this is something to look out for, because this is sort of the guideline on how to interpret everything you're getting. It's very old. It's not like JSON. It's different. But luckily, there are libraries available if you can make sense of it. But this is all fine and good. This is the old world. And now we're getting into renewables. So this happens. And more importantly, this is happening where solar panels are put on the roofs of consumers, individual houses, maybe small windmills. And energy is being generated everywhere. And now, especially in Germany, to the point where in 2015, we were very tied to our chairs. I was on the desk having a separate laptop just watching the grid because there was a solar eclipse. So at a certain point, a last part of the generation, the solar panel generation would drop. And after about half an hour, it would come back. But we need to match supply demand instantly. So how do we manage demand? There was a lot of things we did beforehand. But this is something to watch out for. We have to maintain a continuous balance. So this is the week in Germany. And what you can see here is this is the energy being generated. So at the top, you see the orange peaks. There is solar energy. At the beginning of the week, there wasn't much solar. There also wasn't much wind, which is the greenest one. But at the end of the week, when there's less energy usage, there was more solar, more wind. And to compensate, there was more coal and other fossil fuels being used in the beginning of the week. And this then translates to price. You see the blue and the red lines which are the prices the day before the day begins. People can bid energy. They can supply. And also are going to use. And in the day itself, people can also go to the market. So we have a mismatch. We have low solar wind power. So therefore the prices are high in it. Then it's viable to start up the power plants. The conventional ones. And there are parties who go into this price difference. And I think one of the first parties was in 2009 in the UK. There was, I would say, a lock-in fridge. It was a fridge tied to the internet. And in this case, N-Power would determine when to switch it on and off. It would maintain a very constant temperature. It would be in control. And now this year in Belgium there will be a similar project with boilers. And they estimate to roll out 10,000 boilers connected to the internet which are controlled by Restore. And they then have effectively 25 megawatt to control to the grid and to go to the market with. But what does that mean for me as a consumer? Well, I want to participate in the market. I need pricing and therefore frequent billing, because the prices fluctuate. Therefore I need a frequent readout and thus in the IT world of the day we need a digital remote readout, which is the smart meter that's coming along. And in Europe, most of the countries are doing that. This is a report from 2014 to say how far we are and what the different countries are doing. For example, in Germany they are fairly limited in the rollout and other countries they far much further and this is the timeline by which they are doing it. So most of the countries in Europe are already pushing out smart meters now. One of the first was Sweden and the experience there is that they introduce monthly billing instead of yearly and now even they offer hourly billing. So it's a much more frequent market people can participate in. Of course there are privacy concerns. This is a poster from a campaign in the Netherlands about the smart meter spying on people. And this is a real concern because what do you know what they are reading because it's a wireless uplink, right? Maybe there are policies in place but still. So luckily in the Netherlands, also a bit in Belgium in Luxembourg we have a P1 port which is a serial port by which the readings are spit out as well in addition. And in the UK we have this ZigBee smart energy so locally you can put a display and read it out. And it's very dependent on just the energy company. And so in practice if you want to do something with energy data on the one hand you have the verified chain. It's on the top where you have the smart meter reporting back to the back end and the bills are drafted and inside is given but there's a low latency. We don't have much bandwidth in the telecom industry, not enough or not cheap enough for all the smart meters. So what we do also in practice if you want to do something with energy data is you have something in house collecting energy data. You either use it there or you put it on your own back end do some analysis, maybe disaggregation, that's where you look at patterns to see what the different devices are using and then you display it there. In Germany they have a quite different model where they are very large distribution system operators. So every region has a small grid operator. So there are various meters involved so what they do is they make a small communication device which is a smart meter gateway that connects to the meters that are available connects locally for a readout to the internet, to the energy suppliers but what's in the left corner in the bottom left corner is the CLS, the controllable load system. So this energy device has the potential to switch or direct energy data and some appliances, so maybe your solar panels the energy company could potentially switch them off if they're allowed to in the right authorizations are given. So then you come to the real need for a home energy management system. This is the scientific term. This is a system that is used to control your energy usage. And if you want to do something with flexibility this is a very strict and good framework but how to define it. You have something uncontrollable which is statistics solar panels, maybe your computer usage you want to use it, whatever it takes you have something in which you can shift in time because this is a given pattern like a washing machine and you can delay it for a couple of minutes. You have something which is having to be stored at just the temperature you have to maintain. You can vary a lot with when you put it on, switch it on or off and you can also store in the battery of course. And there's the unconstrained where you can say okay I have a diesel generator I can switch it on whatever I want. A colleague of mine he built this charger for his Tesla and he charges his Tesla when the solar panels are generating electricity just by way of experiment. So ideally we'll be in a world where there's energy APIs everywhere, right? We're not there yet but it's coming and we can use this also this is an experiment in Brooklyn where they built a local grid which is balanced, it's a microgrid we call it and they use a Ethereum integration to provide a local cost way of dealing with cost. Now there are various protocols, frameworks especially also for price in particular which you can use if you want to do something with energy data but to summarize there's an increased smart media coverage coming more smart devices are coming the IoT frameworks are available are maturing and there's ever more APIs you can use for measurement and control and if I look out I say okay there's we have to look for easier market adoption so people can join in to the markets that's out there we need to improve the open standards and APIs that are there because some of them are lacking in certain places we need to get those energy management systems out to the houses of people and we have to keep some personal data locker where people can store the precious data especially from years past because there's a lot of intelligence you can use to learn your energy usage so I'm looking for your attention maybe there are questions are you sure that in Belgium you have Serial-Odpute? and some of them do I think it's Hewe F which is providing smart meters with P1 some not all energy companies it's a bit of spread from the Dutch smart meters I have two questions one leads to the other what is the private share of total energy consumption and I'm assuming that the private share of total energy consumption is fairly low so maybe who says that this expensive rollout is worth it because energy prices are dropping so maybe it's simply not worth it to introduce this to private markets maybe it should only be industry that uses this smart grid the industry already has facilities to provide smart metering and the consumer household I think they are limited in what they take on from the market in terms of energy but still we have to get those renewables and if we want to put solar panels everywhere we have to involve the consumers the houses because we need property we need land that's the main thing so we have to incorporate houses there that's the development that's the way I see it and so yeah otherwise or you have companies coming in and renting your roof that's also a business model but then it's not up to the consumer anymore one more question will it be possible for the consumer to take part in the market so that they can sell energy when the prices are high possibly I've got an electric car battery and then I store the cheap solar energy and sell it when it's high so I can empty my battery that's very difficult as a consumer you need to be a business or even the 15 minute billing they do in the energy market it's not readily available there are organizations stepping up to ease that to ease the opening up the market or people collaborate and then they go to the market maybe with a white label party in between some models are coming up but it's still it's not so far okay thank you very much thank you again