SEMIAH: Scalable Energy Management Infrastructure for Aggregation of Households Rune Hylsberg Jacobsen and Emad Ebeid Department of Engineering, University of Aarhus, Denmark Abstract—A novel and open ICT infrastructure for the imple- mentation of automated demand response in households will see the light of day. The Scalable Energy Management Infrastructure for Aggregation of Households (SEMIAH) project will develop a generic environment for the deployment and innovation of smart grid services in households. The SEMIAH concept will enable aggregation of households connected to the grid system and will act through direct load control to remotely shift or curtail electrical loads according to users’ flexibilities. Security and privacy functions will be integrated in all elements. Another essential cornerstone is development of new business models for electricity players and residential customers. I. I NTRODUCTION With the advent of smart grids [1], new solutions for energy management become available. During the last decade, manu- facturers have focused on the development of smart appliances. However, a large market uptake of smart appliances is not expected to occur in the short-term. Demand response, which is defined as changes in electricity usage by consumers from their normal consumption patterns in response to signals from the grid operations or the energy markets, is considered one of the key solutions to improve energy efficiency and for reducing peak demand. However, no automated demand response programs have been implemented for European households despite the fact that households rep- resented approximately 27% of the total energy consumption in Europe in 2010 and were responsible for 10% of the carbon dioxide emissions in 2007. Currently, demand response is in its nascent stage in Eu- rope with the existing programs essentially aimed at large industrial customers, which are easier to manage as one large client representing hundreds of households in terms of energy consumption. Fortunately, the project can leverage on the research from a number of related European projects such as ENCOURAGE [2], ADDRESS [3], and MIRABEL [4]. The consortium behind the SEMIAH project [5] aims to pursue a major technological, scientific and commercial breakthrough by developing a novel ICT infrastructure for the implementation of demand response in households. The SEMIAH infrastructure enables the shifting of energy con- sumption from high energy-consuming loads to off-peak peri- ods with high generation of electricity from renewable energy sources. Fig. 1. SEMIAH overall system concept II. THE PROJECT The SEMIAH project promises to provide a novel and open ICT infrastructure for the implementation of automated demand response in households. The SEMIAH concept, shown in Figure 1, will enable aggregation of all households con- nected to the system and will act through direct load control to remotely shift or curtail electrical loads in a secure manner taking into account the privacy and flexibility of users. The system concept comprises the following elements: • A back-end system, consisting of a central server which manages and controls information from the households connected to the system network, and which provides in- telligent services for energy management of households. • A home energy management gateway to control cus- tomers loads based on the Open Gateway Energy Man- agement Alliance (OGEMA) framework [6]. • A user interface (smartphone application and consumer web portal) that allows the user to configure the set- tings of household equipment and add/remove equipment to/from the system. The second and third elements represent the front-end system of SEMIAH. The demand response system of SEMIAH connects the Distribution System Operator (DSO) and the Transmission System Operator (TSO) over a Wide Area Network (WAN) infrastructure. This enables actors in telecommunication and the energy sector in a joint effort to pursue a more secure and sustainable energy supply for the future.