Energy Efficiency

Watt-IS services increases CEVE’s clients energy savings

Cooperativa Eléctrica do Vale D’Este (CEVE), a Portuguese energy cooperative, distributes power on the LV network and acts as an electricity retailer for around 9,000 customers in the North of Portugal.

CEVE has an imbedded innovative-driven culture to meet its corporate sustainability and social responsibility goals, having been investing in the deployment of smart meters within its concession area since 2016.

Leveraging on the data generated by the smart meters, CEVE partnered with Watt-IS, to develop a remote energy audit service that is being provided to CEVE’s clients, helping them to become more energy efficient and contributing towards the penetration of decentralized renewable energy sources while seeking to increase customer satisfaction.

The energy audit service is based on the analysis of smart meter data to perform load disaggregation of a customer’s household energy use and identify the most adequate and meaningful energy efficiency measures to be adopted for each specific case. An additional on-site visit is done to identify the household’s primary characteristics and specific information of existing appliances, being uploaded onto a mobile web-based platform developed by Watt-IS. Combining these two streams of information with advanced data analytics modules, an automated energy audit report is generated that is made available to CEVE’s clients. 

These reports provide the household owners with a detailed analysis of their energy consumption profile, allowing them to have a breakdown of energy consumption down to appliance level, identifying the most significant loads in a household such as freezers and refrigerators, stand-by power, washing and dish-washing machines, HVAC, hot water equipment and many others.

Additionally, a set of quantified tailor-made energy efficiency measures are also generated to help the clients to better understand what they need to improve on, such as suggestions for: appliance substitution of malfunctioning equipment, the most suitable energy tariffs and contracted power levels, and efficient use of appliances or set-points.

This service, which was commercially deployed in April 2018, has been generating energy savings and economical improvements in households. Despite being a small utility, CEVE has once more proven that innovation grows in smaller and dynamic organizations and partnering with Watt-IS has made possible for this project to have been recognized in the “Smart Energy Elites 2017/2018” publication as one of the most innovative at the European scale in the area, generating value from the application of data analytics on top of smart metering data.