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The world is in a climate crisis. Global warming is a reality and the weather is getting unpredictable. Our way of living needs to change, at all levels. I am worried that the climate crisis is something that the world is going to try to solve too late and after irreversible damages have already been done.

So with Home Assistant we want to do our part to help take on the climate crisis, and help you do the same. One part of fighting the climate crisis is making sure our homes are energy efficient and use low-carbon energy sources.

Starting today, Home Assistant is adding official support for home energy management. Our energy management will help users monitor the energy usage, transition to sustainable energy and save money.

As most homes are struggling to find a spare socket to plug in the latest bit of tech, sales of extension leads and triple adaptors must be going the through the roof. All these devices are only going to increase energy bills. Finding out what these bits of kit use isn’t easy. Nest, owned by Google, make lots of claims on how much you could save by using their thermostat. They then fail to publish meaningful data on their connected home products, such as their Google Home Hub and voice-activated speakers. We contacted them, through their chat service, over three months ago regarding this, and as yet, they have not updated any energy usage data information.

Amazon’s energy usage figures aren’t well publicised and are vague when compared to Apple’s. And we’ve yet to find any environmental reporting, by Amazon, regarding the materials, manufacturing or recycling – not great.

Apple, on the other hand, has got their environmental reporting act together – since the Greenpeace campaign against them a few years back. All the energy usage data is there in understandable terms. Materials used in its manufacture and recycling information are well publicised, unlike the other tech giants!
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Could smart connected homes drive up your energy bills?

Whilst the energy usage of these devices may seem trivial, it’s the cumulative effect of tens of millions of these devices in our homes. All adding to the background energy usage across the country. Even small reductions in the energy usage of smart devices could make massive reductions in the overall UK energy consumption.

A more worrying aspect of these technologies – from an energy usage perspective – is the back-end cloud and network services driving these products. At moment there doesn’t appear to be much information regarding network/cloud and data transaction impact in carbon emissions terms. A host of other factors would need to be considered to get robust reporting on this, for example, data centres, server configurations, and how these are powered (renewables or fossil-fuelled) to give a view on their carbon impact.

Amazon cloud platform AWS, which hosts the software that drives Alexa, achieved 50% renewable energy usage in early 2018. Their in-house combined solar and wind generation is estimated at 2-gigawatt hours per year. This is used to power some of their server farms. However, if you took that energy generation away from powering the AWS servers and turned it to run Alexa home smart speakers, that 2 Gigawatts would only power approximately 95,000 units a year. It’s estimated that over 75,000,000 smart speaker units have been purchased worldwide in 2018.
Standby energy usage improves to be replaced by not so ‘smart’ stuff!

Back in the day standby and plasma TVs were seen as the villains of energy usage. Now most TVs (apart from supersized LEDs) and peripheral devices have cut their energy usage down dramatically. All good, however, standby is still a waste of energy.

Fast-forward to the present… we have a plethora of smart connected products filling up our homes, constantly drawing more and more background energy than standby devices ever did. And the hidden cloud services that provide the intelligence and computer processing power are consuming yet more energy as they monitor our lives! So as fast as we make efficiencies, we find more ways to use electricity! The Jevons paradox.