A Large-Scale Customer-Accessible Energy Monitoring System

Global energy consumption has risen drastically. In Brazil, although economic growth in recent years has been underwhelming, the growth rate of energy consumption has steadily risen. At the beginning of 2015 important adjustments were made to the energy tax. Within the state of Santa Catarina, in particular, the National Agency of Electrical Energy of Brazil (ANEEL) approved a readjustment of 43% on the bills of industrial customers of electricity. The concepts and advantages of Smart Grids make relevant detailed measurements. These aspects, combined with the recent adjustments on electricity bills, demonstrate the need to develop real-time consumption monitoring systems. From this point of view there are not a significant amount of systems designed to achieve those functions efficiently and at a low cost. This paper proposes the development of a low-cost prototype for monitoring the consumption of electricity in real-time using communication with electronic meters of power distribution companies. Specifically, we seek to develop a prototype computer based on the Intel (R) Galileo Gen2 platform and data communication standard ABNT NBR 14522.