PLEMS: Plug Load Energy Management Solution

for Enterprises
Animikh Ghosh, Ketan A Patil, Sunil Kumar Vuppala
Infosys Labs
Infosys Limited, Bangalore, India
Email: {animikh ghosh,ketan patil,sunil vuppala}@infosys.com
AbstractMaximizing energy utilization is a key strategy for
todays enterprise in their effort towards sustainable tomorrow.
Energy accounts for 50% or more of operating prot and 60%
of energy in enterprise is under utilized. Plug loads typically
consume up to 50% of the overall electrical energy usage in an
enterprise. Even though multiple solutions exist such as Building
Management System (BMS) to monitor and control electrical
energy at main level such as HVAC but there are no solutions
that can detect, analyze and trigger automatic actions in real
time at plug load points. The proposed solution for managing
plug loads is called PLEMS which allows to monitor and control
appliances connected to smart plugs in a policy adaptable way
and extend the coverage of existing BMS to plug loads. PLEMS
helps to identify the consumption pattern of any appliance using a
weighted moving average model. New policies are proposed based
on usage/budget along with time based policies to trigger actions
that mitigate or minimize energy wastage. The solution allows
unied monitoring across enterprise with energy integration
dashboard. Two case studies which were carried out in our
enterprise (on ofce appliances) proved that we can potentially
save energy by up to 60% eventually leading to a reduction in
carbon footprint. We showcased another case study to highlight
the actual savings achieved from the same appliances by using
adaptable policies.
Keywords-energy management, energy monitoring, smart
plugs, Zigbee, smart energy, wireless sensor networks, sustain-
ability
I. INTRODUCTION
Enterprises today are under increasing pressure to reduce
their energy consumption as a result of accretion in energy
cost, and also growing concerns regarding impact of energy
consumption on global climate change. Energy usage in IT
organization is unaccounted and granular measurement will
widen up space for extensive research in resource manage-
ment. A plug load is the energy consumed by any electrical
appliance plugged into an AC socket. A vampire or phantom
load is the energy consumed by an appliance in standby or
switched off mode. In a typical ofce environment, the plug
load appliances can be classied in to business essential and
non-business essential equipments. Business essential equip-
ments include desktop computers, monitors, printers, scanners,
fax machines, copiers, etc. Non-business essential equipments
are support items such as projectors, microwave ovens, coffee
machines, water heaters, vending machines, water coolers and
also personal appliances such as mobile chargers. As per US
Annual Energy Outlook 2008 [1], increased penetration of
computers, electronic appliances, and ofce equipment is one
of the signicant factors that inuenced growth in carbon
emissions. A study of plug loads undertaken by Lawrence
Berkley National Laboratories (LBNL) [2] estimated that plug
load appliances can consume anywhere between 10% to 50%
of the total energy use of a building. Hence, plug loads
present a signicant opportunity for energy managers to cut
energy consumption in ofce buildings, reduce energy cost and
demonstrate reduction in enterprise carbon footprint through
employment of simple and effective practices and processes
(such as deploying PLEMS). Secondary benets from cutting
down plug loads(such as computers and other equipment
which generate heat) includes reduction in the need for HVAC
cooling in turn resulting cost savings.
Contributions of this paper are:
Propose a solution for enterprise plug loads which allows
remote monitoring and control of the appliances con-
nected to smart plugs (intelligent plugs that can measure
power usage).
Identify the consumption pattern at each energy consump-
tion point.
Curb the identied energy wastage using smart plugs with
the aid of adaptable policy congurations.
Extend Building Management System (BMS) device cov-
erage by adding smart plugs.
Key benets of the solution are:
Unied application dashboard to monitor and control all
appliances in a building/campus.
Time based (On/Off for specied time) and usage/budget
based (certain limit of power usage) polices can be
applied to reduce wastage of energy.
Signicant energy savings can be achieved from ofce
plug load appliances with acceptable Return On Invest-
ment (RoI).
Reduction in carbon footprint.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
outlines an overview of existing smart plug solutions from the
literature. PLEMS architecture and features are discussed in
section III. Adaptable policy framework is discussed in section
IV and the deployment setup is described in section V. The
results are analyzed and insights are presented in section VI
with three case studies. Section VII draw conclusions and
discuss future directions.
2013 IEEE 27th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications
1550-445X/13 $26.00 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/AINA.2013.45
25
II. RELATED WORK
There is a need for granular level energy management
towards enterprise sustainability goal. A report from Laurence
Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) [2] estimates almost
60% of desktop, more than 30% of printers and copiers, 90%
of fax machines and many other ofce equipments continue to
remain powered on even after ofce hours. LightWise [3] aims
at evaluating lighting control systems to reduce wastage of
energy in ofce buildings using wireless sensors. In article [4]
the authors suggest use of occupancy sensors to automate
commercial lighting that continued to be switched ON after
ofce hours. PowerNet [5] is a hybrid sensor network for mon-
itoring the electrical consumption and utilization of computing
systems in a large building. Analysis revealed that 56% of the
total building energy budget is used by computers. Hence,
it is necessary to monitor and control energy consumed by
these computing systems such as desktop and servers. In a
relevant article [6] the authors see power management as the
next frontier of research in computer science. Using trafc
characterization of university dormitory computers, the article
show that there is signicant idle time that can be exploited
for power management. As per the authors of this article, the
expected amount of energy saving accounts to 0.8 - 2.7 billion
US dollars annually.
The existing literature discussed above and some
more [7], [8], [9] address the issue of energy wastage
due to plug load appliances during and after ofce hours. It
is critical to monitor granular level energy consumption from
a central dashboard or feed such end point consumption data
to building management system dashboard so that decision
and actions can be undertaken from an enterprise perspective.
The National Renewable energy laboratory (RNEL) suggested
a baseline for plug and process loads (PPLs) [10]. CRTs
were replaced by LCDs and use of occupancy sensors to
turn on/off break room equipments such as printer, copier
and coffee machine. RNEL claim the innovative application
of energy-efcient PPL equipment and design strategies may
account to an overall savings of 47%, but RNEL neither
proposed an automated system to verify the same nor they
provided a scheme for much closer monitoring of endpoint
energy consumption. Enterprises apply xed policies to reduce
after ofce hours energy consumption to some extent but
these policies are not exible and may not be able to adjust
the demand dynamically. Most of the policies in an enterprise
are time based and these recurrent events may not be enough
for minimizing the energy wastage. Pattern analysis for each
energy consumption point is not available in the existing
solutions. The authors in [11], [12], [13] discuss the home
energy management system by scheduling the appliances to
minimize the energy bill. To make this possible, some system
like smart plug management is necessary. The authors in [14]
discuss the real time demand response model in a commercial
building aspect. In all these cases, PLEMS bridges the gap by
enabling intelligence via applying feedback based adaptable
policies to monitor and control the appliances.
III. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
PLEMS helps in monitoring energy consumed by individual
plug load appliances in real time and execute commands
to turn an appliance on/off remotely from a central dash-
board. PLEMS can also be integrated to an enterprise BMS
dashboard to extend BMS control to each and every plug-
in appliance. An alert-response notication system actively
monitors implemented policy and constantly perform pattern
recognition analysis on accumulated data in order to spot
additional opportunities to save energy (Section V).
Fig. 1. PLEMS Components
PLEMS is described in the following sections:
A. Hardware Setup:
Zigbee is a low power wireless communication technology
used for monitoring and control of enterprise and domestic
appliances. It is based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard which
denes the physical layer and medium access control for
personal area network. A Zigbee prole is a domain space
of related applications and devices. Zigbee Smart energy (SE)
is a public application prole which denes a wide range
of Zigbee networked devices intended for use in the energy
supply management. The hardware set-up consists of SE plugs
(Z0E-MP1(a) and ZOE-MLC1(b) from SimpleHomnet) and
SE gateways (Connectport X2 SE (c) from Digi International)
as shown in Fig. 1. They are interlinked in a wireless SE
network. The SE gateway acts as a bridge between SE network
and IP based Ethernet network. The SE plug provides power
control, monitoring and effective coupling to both SE network
and IP based Ethernet network. Security is based on elliptic-
curve cryptography (ECC). A secured link key is generated
using Certicom Security software [15] to add a provable
identity for SE devices. Initial network commissioning involve
joining SE plugs to SE gateway by entering security key of
individual device and push button mechanism to bind the
device. It was observed a gateway can comfortably handle
15 SE plugs and can communicate at a distance of 100 meters
line of sight.
B. System Architecture:
PLEMS is a 3-tier architecture composed of a data creation
layer, a business functionality layer and a web application layer
as depicted in Fig. 2
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Fig. 2. PLEMS Architecture
1) Data Creation Layer: The responsibility of this layer
is acquisition of data from sensors/actuators and make it
available to business functionality layer. The key components
of this layer are:
Remote end devices: These devices(smart plugs in our
case) report energy consumed by the appliance plugged
in.
Smart Energy (SE) gateway: It has poll handler for
incoming data and command handler to execute outgoing
commands. Digi connectport X2 is used for local data
aggregation from smart plugs using Zigbee SE protocol
and transmit that data to PLEMS central server over
Ethernet.
Data repository: The central repository of PLEMS stores
historical energy consumption data from all smart plugs
for analytics and research.
2) Business Functionality Layer: This layer is responsible
for data reception on the server side, update database, generate
alerts, process data for display on the web application and
handles triggers generated on the web application to switch
on/off an appliance. The major components of this layer are
middleware, business logic, hibernate logic and the presenta-
tion logic.
Middleware: It has 3 sub modules namely Incoming Data
Handler for processing data packets from gateway, the
Outgoing Data Handler for processing on/off command
from web application layer to issue on/off command to
device specic gateway and has a Sensor Cloud Update
module to update current sensor activity, data or status
information.
Business logic: This module is responsible for generating
alerts if there is a sensor data threshold breach. In our
application an alert is sent by SMS or email to the
operator if a smart plug is turned on during the time it is
supposed to be off (policy enforcement) or vice versa.
Also data poll is triggered from business logic which
travels down the middle-ware to a specic gateway to
fetch live data information from its associated end devices
(smart plugs in our context).
Presentation logic: Contains Dashboard, login, alerts, data
view, end device, gateway communication and device
control to prepare data for the web application layer. It
also process triggers generated on the web application to
control a particular end device.
Hibernate logic connects data repository to application
logic.
3) Web application layer: The web application layer pro-
vides user interface that is designed to be easy-to-use and
to visualize energy consumption/wastage information from a
country level view to an individual plug level detail. En-
ergy wastage is currently dened as energy used by ofce
equipments after business hours, or lying idle during peak
load hour. The web application of PLEMS is unique to each
user and has customizable widgets for better viewability (refer
Fig. 3). PLEMS has integrated user management tools for
administrator to set up and manage user accounts, permission
and authentication. Technician (PLEMS user category) widget
allows seamless commissioning of hardware devices.
The archived data can be used to study consumption patterns
and help to extract information such as, top 5 power consuming
appliances as they remain powered ON even after business
hours and any appliance consuming more power than its
ideal wattage rating that indicates malfunctioning of the
device. Data from smart plugs is analyzed and converted in
to useful information which empower decisions to improve
energy efciency and comfort.
An important feature of PLEMS is policy enforcement.
Enterprise today enforce only time based policies such as
Switch off common area equipments after 8:00 PM to next
day morning 8:00 a.m. But with the availability of real time
energy data, enterprise can dene sophisticated policies as
Switch off any copier if it consumes more than 3 units in a
day,Switch off any printer even before scheduled shutdown
time if the appliance is idle for continuous period of one hour.
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This policy can be loaded from BMS. PLEMS application
server can also issue a switch off command (without BMS
intervention) to a printer that violates an enforced policy. This
completes the feedback loop as PLEMS server can trigger
an action such as switch off based on an enforced policy.
The budget allocation for a particular appliance can be made
adaptable based on historical analysis. Budget based policies
can adapt to such change in budget allocation.
Fig. 3. PLEMS Dashboard
IV. LEVERAGING ADAPTABLE POLICY FRAMEWORK OF
PLEMS
PLEMS can not only identify wastage of energy by
appliances running during non-working hours but also has the
ability to apply policies to switch on/off an appliance after
non-working hours. But there may be appliances which gets
stopped being used an hour or two before working hours end.
So static policy gets enforced only after the expiry of the
dened working hours, but still there is some wastage due to
unnecessary running of that particular appliance. Minimizing
energy wastage without effecting business continuity and
respecting employee comfort is a multi objective task. In
context of the paper, we consider only the sub problem
of adaptable policy enforcement model. In enterprises,
there might be time based policies to switch on/off any
appliances or resources. This is a manual process and with
the introduction of smart devices(such as smart gateways and
smart plugs) it can be automated. But the adaptable policy
works beyond the static time based policies to achieve stated
objectives. In this process, the consumption pattern at each
energy consumption point is estimated and monitoring of
the environment parameters is carried out with the aid of
smart low power sensors. We can follow weighted moving
average (WMA) to arrive at decision of a point estimate [16].
Weighted Moving Average(WMA) of the last n values (here
n represents days) can be represented as in Equation1 where
w
i
> w
j
, i > j to give more importance to recent values. p
i
represents aggregate energy consumption by an appliance(as
reported by smart plug) on day i.
WMA =

n
i=1
w
i
p
i

n
i=1
w
i
(1)
Fig. 4. Flowchart describing our model of adaptable policies
By giving historical data of the energy consumption at peri-
odic time interval (time series data), we can get the point esti-
mates of forecasts using the WMA model. This helps to make
the policies adaptable as described in the Fig. 4. In this model,
inuence of external factors is considered. For example,Water
heaters are used more frequently by employees on winter days
than on summer, which is an inuence of external weather
condition whereas use of printers or copiers depends only
on presence of employees (can be detected with the use of
occupancy sensor). If we do not have any inuence from the
external factors, then the point estimate is minimum of X
a
, t
without harming business continuity. Let us take the scenario
of a summer working day and say, we have three weeks of
prior data on historical consumption of the appliances such as
water heater and water cooler. We assigned the weights of w
from 20 to 1 for the energy consumption data of last 20 days
to forecast the present day consumption(weight of last day is
20, day before that will have 19 and so on). We have given
maximum weight (i.e. 20) to the same day of operation in
the last weeks (i.e. Wednesday). In equation (1), n=20. With
this, we are able to forecast the energy requirements of that
particular day and switch on/off the appliances accordingly.
Corresponding savings are highlighted in the results section
(Section VI(c)).
V. DEPLOYMENT SETUP
PLEMS is easy to deploy and congure. PLEMS has been
deployed to monitor and control Business essential appliances
such as desktop (monitors and CPUs) of employees (as de-
picted in Fig. 5) and consumption by non-business essential
equipments such as printer, coffee-machine, water heater and
water cooler (as shown in Fig. 6) in break room area of
a building. We have used Digi Connectport X2 gateway to
28
connect via wireless to smart plugs. The gateways report to
PLEMS server. We have deployed both the 15A and 30A
version of the smart plugs to monitor and control different low
load (printer, water cooler) and high load ofce equipments
(such as water heaters). On one oor we have deployed
60 smart plugs to measure energy consumption by desktop
(monitor and CPU are connected to a smart plug each) of 30
employees. We have also deployed 4 smart plugs to measure
power consumption by water heater, water cooler, printer and
coffee machine per break room. We have collected data from
10 such break room areas spread across different buildings in
the campus.
Fig. 5. PLM Solution Deployed for Desktop
VI. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
A. Non-Working Hours Case study: Desktops
Desktop computers consuming a large percentage of ofce
electricity load [2] can be attributed to the following reasons:
Many computers are powered on during ofce hours,
but remain unused for various reasons. For example, an
employee may step out for a meeting or attend a training
session or a leisure break. On an average, a computer
is actually used for only 5-6 hours out of the total 8-9
working hours (WH).
Desktop computers are left powered on even after ofce
hours/during non-working hours(NW) including week-
ends because employees forget to switch them off while
leaving for the day.
We have run an internal pilot to monitor power consumption
by desktop and CPUs of 30 employees by connecting their
monitor and CPU to a 15A smart plug each and a couple
of gateways to span the range of smart plugs in cubicles,
distributed over a oor. We deployed PLEMS (only the data
gathering was done for analysis and depicting insights) for
an entire month to monitor the power consumption. Table I
shows that the average after ofce hours consumption by
a LCD monitor and a CPU were 50.37% and 46.75% of
their total monthly consumption respectively. The monthly
consumption was extrapolated over a year and we also ob-
served, a yearly saving potential (NW yearly bill) of USD
(United States Dollar) 15.10 per monitor and USD 31.06
per CPU is achievable if the resources are shutdown after
ofce hours, at the unit energy price of USD 0.11 per kWh
[17]. Desktop cannot be powered down just by smart plug
actuation as it requires soft shutdown process to save/close all
running softwares and terminate operating system. We assume
an enterprise admin has full control over any desktop in the
network to remotely shutdown them. But desktop does not
follow any heterogeneous protocol to report usage statistics in
real-time back to admin. Cisco devices (such as IP telephony)
use their custom EnergyWise [18] system whereas enterprise
lights and fans use software from Johnson Controls [19] to
report usage statistics data. So an enterprise admin can be
informed via PLEMS when any desktop is lying unused (based
on usage data reported by smart plug), they can take manual
or congure policy to trigger remote action such as shutdown
the machine or send SMS/Email to the owner of that machine
as a warning that his/her machine is consuming idle power.
Also there exist desktops outside enterprise network due to
client requirements (especially in projects where sensitive data
is handled, as in banking domain). For these desktops, the
enterprise admin can neither monitor nor remotely control
them. In such scenarios if PLEMS is deployed then admin
can track the usage of those desktops and take necessary
action (such as asking clarication from the employee who is
assigned that machine) if the machine is running after ofce
hours or on weekends. On urgent need they can also power
down those machines by smart plug actuation(though it will
not be soft shutdown).
This case study proved the need for an effective PLEMS in
an enterprise not only to track top energy wasting appliances
also to help an enterprise admin design policies that trigger,
to soft shutdown desktops which are not being used actively.
The above results inspired us to carry out another such study
of enterprise break room area equipments.
B. Non-Working Hours Case study:Break room area equip-
ments
The seemingly neglected set of ofce appliances which
contribute to sufcient amount of energy wastage are the
break room area equipments such as printers, coffee machines,
micro ovens, water heaters, vending machines and water
coolers. These machines keep running even after ofce
hours/working hours (WH) and no one remembers or takes
the responsibility to switch off these machines as they do
not ofcially belong to any employee (whereas a desktop
is assigned to an employee). The non-working hour (NW)
consumption was observed to be signicant from the data
collected by our PLEMS deployment to one such break room
area for one month continuously. (We have dened WH as
morning 9:00 till evening 17:59 and NW is dened as 18:00
hr to next day 8:59 Hr, Monday to Friday and Friday 18:00
Hr to Monday 8:59 Hr). Table II shows that the average after
ofce hours consumption by a water heater, printer, water
cooler and coffee machine are 60.03%, 43.15%, 57.07%
and 67.07% of their total monthly consumption respectively.
The monthly consumption was extrapolated over a span of
one year and it is observable that a yearly saving potential
(NW yearly bill) of USD 40.16 per water heater, USD 49.38
per Printer, USD 17.69 per water cooler and USD 65.33
per coffee machine is possible. For example in our campus
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TABLE I
NON-WORKING HOURS CASE STUDY:DESKTOPS - POTENTIAL SAVINGS
Appliance Average Monthly Average NW monthly Energy Tariff Average Yearly Average NW Yearly Potential
Type Consumption consumption (USD/KWh) Bill Bill savings %
(in kWh) (in kWh) (USD) (USD) (NW/Total)
Monitor (LCDs) 22.68 11.426 0.11 29.94 15.10 50.37
CPU 50.33 23.53 0.11 66.44 31.06 46.75
TABLE II
NON-WORKING HOURS CASE STUDY: BREAK ROOM AREA EQUIPMENTS - POTENTIAL SAVINGS
Appliance Total Monthly NW monthly Energy Tariff Total Yearly NW Yearly Potential
Type Consumption consumption (USD/KWh) Bill Bill savings%
(in kWh) (in kWh) (USD) (USD) (NW/Total)
Water Heater 50.682 30.43 0.11 66.90 40.16 60.03
Printer 86.68 37.41 0.11 114.42 49.38 43.15
Water Cooler 23.49 13.4 0.11 31.00 17.69 57.07
Coffee Machine 73.80 49.55 0.11 97.41 65.33 67.07
Fig. 6. PLM Solution Deployment in ofce break room area
we have a water heater (in break room area) per oor of a
building and in total have 1200 (approximately) water heaters
deployed all over Infosys. Then there is potentiality of saving
USD 48,196 annually just from the water heaters. A detailed
analysis of per appliance consumption pattern will help an
enterprise to analyze the root cause of wastage. Fig. 7 shows
the daily consumption pattern by these break room area
equipments during working and after working/ non-working
hours as reported by our PLEMS for a regular weekday. The
key insights from Fig. 7 are:
Power consumed in active mode among these appliances
is highest by water heaters.
The coffee machine was manually shut down by Infosys
staff at 6 pm in the evening. This is a desired scenario.
The water heater was switched ON to active mode as
early as 5:00 am in the morning which may not be
required. PLEMS can apply policy to keep it off and turn
Fig. 7. A Typical Working Day Consumption pattern by enterprise Break
Room Area Appliances
on during start of ofce hours (around 8:30 a.m. - 9:00
a.m. according to our ofce timing).
The printer kept being used even after ofce hours (as-
sumed end of WH is 6:00 p.m.) which can be considered
as energy wastage. An enterprise may apply policy to
switch off oor level or common area level printers and
can keep one or two active printers per building without
harming business continuity.
PLEMS allows to view the power consumption trend for a
plug-in appliance for the selected duration (Today, Yesterday,
One week, month) and compare it with the power consumption
threshold limit set by the administrator as shown in Fig. 8.
An added advantage of deploying PLEMS is, if there are
policies applied to keep an appliance switched off and if
some employee/staff switches it on or vice versa, an alert gets
raised in PLEMS dashboard and the alert can be sent to the
responsible person via SMS or email. This feature safeguards
against violation of policy enforced via PLEMS. Fig. 9 depicts
the consumption pattern by these same appliances on a Sunday.
The key observations from Fig. 9 are:
Water heater was actively used between 10 am and 11
am on a Sunday morning. (spike can be seen)
The standby consumption of water heater is less than
printer because of the presence of a thermostat in water
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Fig. 8. Consumption trend of a Coffee machine
heaters. (observe data after 15:00 in Fig. 9). This type
of observations will help prioritize the shut down of
appliances. It is more important to switch off the printer
than water heater during non-working hours as it has
a higher standby power consumption. Based on such
insights an admin can enforce appliance specic policies
via PLEMS to cut down signicant energy consumption
(reduce wastage) indirectly contributing to savings for an
enterprise.
Fig. 9. A Typical Working Day Consumption pattern by enterprise Break
Room Area Appliances
C. Non-working hour case study: Actual energy savings by
adaptable policy enforcement via PLEMS
The above two case studies show that PLEMS can be used
to potentially save signicant amount of utility bill for an
enterprise. An experiment was conducted to switch off all
break room area equipments just after ofcial working hours
(6:00 p.m. in our enterprise) and switch them back on just
before start of working hours (at 8:59 am) by conguring pol-
icy from PLEMS dashboard. Since PLEMS has an adaptable
policy framework, few appliances started being shutdown even
before their scheduled shutdown time. PLEMS learned these
appliances were stopped being used an hour or so before their
schedule shutdown time on a regular basis. It does not harm
business continuity as an employee can always override any
enforced policy to turn on an appliance with the help of a
button on the smart plug. If a override happens it gets raised
as an alert on PLEMS dashboard just to report such a policy
breach has happened. For Example, It was observed few water-
heaters were shutdown at 3 P.M. in the afternoon even though
the policy congured shutdown time is 6 P.M. This type of
policy adaptability may contribute to further energy savings
apart from static time based policies.
The standby (relay switched off but plug consumes nonzero
energy) consumption of 15A and 30A plugs that were used
to connect desktop, printers, water coolers is observed to be
0.0002 kWh. So the annual energy consumption of such a
plug during non-working hours will be 1.1808 kWh (following
same NW denition as used for previous calculation). So the
price will be approximately USD 0.13, which is negligible . It
is evident that there is no signicant contribution to the utility
bill due to the standby power consumption of the smart plugs.
This value has been normalized out in our energy consump-
tion calculation as it appears insignicant. Energy consump-
tion data was collected by applying policies via PLEMS on
all break room area equipments for one month. The average
energy consumption by each type of break room area equip-
ment is presented in Table III. Actual Savings(AS) on average
(per appliance type) is calculated as the difference in NW
yearly bill of Table II and Table III and the overall reduction in
average monthly consumption achieved (via adaptable policy
framework) for appliances such as water heater and coffee
machine. Ideally NW bill after applying policy should be zero
but consumption indicates there were policy breaches due to
employee overriding them to avail service during non-working
hours (to support business continuity). For example, a coffee
machine on average saves USD 36 yearly. So, it may contribute
to signicant reduction in utility bill as there are hundreds
of such appliances in just one large campus of an enterprise
spreading over different buildings. Hence by applying policy
to switch off appliances via PLEMS, we can indeed achieve
the potential savings promised in Table I and Table II.
D. Commercialization Challenge - issue of Return on Invest-
ment
Return on Investment (ROI) stands out to be a crucial factor
in the path of commercialization of any solution such as this
PLEMS for enterprises. We have purchased the gateways for
USD 90 each and the 15A and 30A smart plugs for USD 30
and 50 respectively. The hardware cost gets reduced if a bulk
order is made. Since each gateway talks with 15 smart plugs
so average deployment cost of a 15A and a 30A smart plug
is USD 36 and USD 56 respectively (Deployment cost of a
smart plug = cost of smart plug + (1/15)th cost of gateway).
Table IV draws an estimation of the ROI if PLEMS is
deployed for the appliances used for internal pilot. The ROI
for monitor and water cooler may not look good but can be
benecial in the long run. It can be observed ROI can go down
if PLEMS is deployed on appliances of higher wattage rating
(for example water heater in our pilot scenario) or appliances
which are used heavily by employees (such as printers).
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TABLE III
NON-WORKING HOURS CASE STUDY: ACTUAL ENERGY SAVINGS WITH THE AID OF POLICY ADAPTABLE PLEMS FRAMEWORK
appliance Total Monthly NW monthly Energy Tariff Total Yearly NW Yearly Actual Savings
Type Consumption consumption (USD/KWh) Bill Bill (USD/Year)
(in kWh) (in kWh) (USD) (USD)
Water Heater 45.432 3.11 0.11 59.97 4.10 36.06
Printer 87.55 7.32 0.11 115.56 9.66 40.02
Water Cooler 24.55 2.12 0.11 32.40 2.79 14.90
Coffee Machine 69.80 1.11 0.11 92.13 1.46 63.87
TABLE IV
COMMERCIALIZATION CHALLENGE: RETURN ON INVESTMENT
appliance Potential Savings Deployment ROI
Type (USD/Yr from Cost (in years)
Tables I and II) (one time)
Water Heater 40.16 56 1.39
Printer 49.38 36 0.72
Water Cooler 17.69 36 2.03
Coffee Machine 65.33 56 0.85
CPU 31.06 36 1.15
Monitor 15.10 36 2.38
E. The Green Effect:
On average, for one unit (kWh) of electricity, 743 gm of
carbon dioxide [20] will be emitted. In a typical enterprise
50% of energy consumption is from the plug loads. The total
energy consumed at Infosys is 250 million units per annum,
therefore the plug load energy share is a minimum of 125
million units considering 50% share. By using PLEMS, the
potential energy savings of up to 60% can reduce carbon
emissions by 55 kilo tons.
VII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
PLEMS allows the user to monitor the power consumption
pattern of individual appliances using unied dashboard and
allows remotely controlling them. As a lateral advantage
the user can nd out if an appliance needs servicing or is
malfunctioning from its instantaneous power consumption.
PLEMS can bring smartness into the infrastructure which
allows monitoring and control of legacy appliances in the
building. The adaptable policy model and case studies high-
light signicant actual energy savings from the appliances that
leads to a reduction in the carbon footprint. In future work,
we plan to use PLEMS to be integral part of smart grid (along
with smart meters) to participate in demand response programs
proposed by utility companies and extend PLEMS to home
users.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Jayraj Ugarkar, Kiran H S,
Vikas Kannav and Prof. GNS Prasanna for their valuable in-
puts during the system development, deployment and analysis
process.
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