Matter – The natural choice for enabling grid-friendly energy management of Energy Smart Appliances
Matter is the mass-market solution to smart home interoperability, developed and adopted by leading and innovative companies across the industry including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung, and the hundreds of device makers that are Members of the Connectivity Standards Alliance. Matter has already experienced widespread adoption and is used in a diverse array of smart home products and ecosystems. With the release of Energy Reporting and Energy Management features as part of the Matter 1.3 specification, product makers can enable any eligible Matter device to report its energy use. When connected to smart home ecosystems or energy displays that support these new features, consumers will be better able to monitor and even automate their energy use and reduce their carbon footprint. However, Matter’s potential extends further, enabling smart home and energy management systems (EMS) to self-optimize and support grid-friendly operations, alleviating stress on the grid at peak times, leveraging the variable nature of renewable power sources, and reducing costs for users.
The Search for a Global Standard
Governments, energy utilities, and manufacturers have long sought a global standard to unite how energy information and monitoring happens in homes, seeking the flexibility to align with the diversity of products, programs, regional technologies, and go-to-market approaches. As an industry-led open-source, royalty-free interoperability technology built on IP — the foundational technology of the Internet — Matter is ideal for global adoption to provide a solution for this quest.
Numerous initiatives have been launched to reduce grid load during peak times. Still, the landscape of our electricity grids is evolving with the increasing integration of renewable sources like wind and solar. Focus is shifting from the total energy consumed to the instantaneous power usage at any given moment. In response, Matter’s Energy Management team has been diligently working to incorporate support for features that enable energy reporting and management applications into the Matter standard. This global standard includes the foundations for enabling current and future Matter-supported device types across all regions. Matter 1.3 includes specific support for key types of electrical loads, including electric vehicle (EV) charging, air conditioning, and household appliances, with additional device types to follow in 1.4 and the future, such as heat pumps, solar, batteries, and water heaters. By supporting energy balancing both within homes and across the grid and allowing integration with protocols like OpenADR 3.0, Matter, with its global adoption, will play a key role in enabling millions of existing and new devices in homes, buildings, and on store shelves to contribute to a more sustainable energy future.
The Importance of Energy Management
With an urgent need to tackle climate change, governments around the globe are encouraging consumers to transition from fossil fuels to electric alternatives. This shift motivates consumers to buy EVs and replace their gas or oil-fired boilers with electric heating, ultimately increasing demand on the electrical grid. Governments are driving manufacturers to integrate ‘Energy Smart Appliance’ (ESA) technology into products to prevent blackouts. Appliances like water heaters, heating systems, EV chargers, solar panels, and even white goods can use energy flexibly. For example, avoiding EV charging at the typical 6:00 PM peak will still meet charging needs while easing grid strain and reducing carbon emissions.
Defining the Energy Smart Appliance & Understanding Use Cases
Appliances such as AC units have had simple hard-wired interfaces for numerous years, allowing a grid-connected controller to ask it to reduce consumption in defined power limitation steps (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%). The Matter implementation of energy management transforms this approach and facilitates communication between home devices to optimize energy use. For instance, a home with rooftop solar panels and a washing machine can have its local energy management system (EMS) ask the solar system about its expected power production for the day. When the consumer sets the washing machine with a ‘flexible start time,’ the machine shares its power needs with the EMS. The EMS can then determine the best time to run the washing machine, ensuring it uses the free solar energy available, minimizing grid power import.
In many parts of the world, during peak energy demand periods when renewable sources like wind and solar are underproducing, the grid relies on traditional fossil fuel generators, making it less green. By informing consumers and their ESAs about these grid events, we can reduce carbon emissions and demand on the grid. Conversely, when there’s excess wind and solar power, ESAs can automatically turn on, allowing consumers to benefit from lower-cost or even free energy and preventing the need to shut down renewable sources.
How Matter Makes It Possible
The Matter 1.3 specification introduced several new features, including Electrical Power and Electrical Energy measurement clusters, which enable Matter devices that support the functionality to report real-time power, voltage, current, and a host of other readings to help an EMS understand current conditions. The Device Energy Management cluster allows ESAs that support this Matter functionality to report their power forecast, detailing expected energy usage over the next few hours. While some ESAs, like solar inverters, may only report power production, others can be requested to shift start times, pause operations, adjust instantaneous power, or respond to grid events by increasing or decreasing power usage as needed.
Benefits of Matter Interoperability
Matter is designed for home operation, offering numerous benefits to manufacturers focused on building and shipping hardware. Consumers can use their existing smart assistants, smartphone apps, or smart TVs to control devices within an intelligent ecosystem, keeping the information exchange between devices within the home, giving developers and users more options to manage the security and privacy of their data. This also reduces cloud message handling costs and allows manufacturers to avoid building their own cloud infrastructure. As an open-source, royalty-free, and inherently interoperable protocol, Matter supports manufacturers through a rigorous certification program. The SDK is freely available on GitHub and includes an example energy management application to help manufacturers get started.
Managing Grid Stability
For day-to-day operations, local EMS systems can optimize Energy Service Agreements to collaborate effectively, reducing customer bills and carbon emissions. However, grid-side control necessitates connectivity to cloud services, requiring responsible actions by grid controllers and potentially mandating licensing in certain jurisdictions. Most Matter controllers are already linked to backend clouds, supporting functions like remote appliance monitoring and control via mobile apps. These controllers, often internet-connected, engage with energy flexibility aggregators or Demand Side Response Service Providers (DSRSPs) to leverage appliance flexibility. Specialist IP-based protocols, such as OpenADR 3.0, have been demonstrated to seamlessly integrate with Matter, facilitating the advertisement and control of grid events.
Matter Leads the Way
Matter is revolutionizing the smart home industry as a seamless, interoperable solution. Matter 1.3 kicked off the energy management journey, introducing energy reporting capabilities and setting the baseline for future features. This enables energy optimization and helps consumers reduce their carbon footprint and manage their energy bills more effectively. As governments push for a transition from fossil fuels to electric alternatives, the demand for smart energy solutions continues to grow. Matter’s open-source, royalty-free platform meets this need by facilitating communication between home devices and the grid, ensuring efficient and sustainable energy management. By keeping data handling primarily within the home, cloud costs are reduced, and data privacy is strengthened. With its rigorous certification program and freely available SDK, Matter is poised to lead the way in creating a smarter, greener future for homes worldwide.
Interested to learn more about Matter? https://csa-iot.org/all-solutions/matter/
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