Customer energy portal for buildings in NTU

Abstract

In order to support Singapore’s current efforts of developing a smart energy economy, a customer energy portal (CEP) for buildings in NTU is proposed to encourage owners to be more concerned about their electricity usage, create awareness and effective ways to reduce and manage their usage to save electricity costs while playing a part to contribute to the conservation of energy. This is in line with the aim of the Intelligent Energy System (IES) Pilot project that was launched by Energy Market Authority to build a smart grid system. The objective of this project is to build an interactive CEP that presents total energy consumption information to each building owner in a user-friendly manner to assist building owners in monitoring their electricity usage. Microsoft ASP.NET is selected to be the web development framework for developing the CEP due to its compatibility with external applications and capability in creating dynamic web pages. Two sets of databases were designed for the CEP to store administrative information and energy consumption data of users. Web pages were then designed and created to meet the objective of this project. Following which, these web pages underwent several testing procedures to ensure its capability to function both independently and as a system, and evaluate its reliability in securing confidential information. The results of the testing were then summarised and evaluated in a test summary report. The overall results affirm that the main objective of developing a CEP to present total energy consumption information to building owners in a user-friendly manner to assist building owners in monitoring their electricity usage is achieved. The societal needs and sustainability issues that this project addresses is also discussed. This report then concludes with several recommendations of potential developments to this project that can be implemented in the efforts to create a smarter energy economy.