Silicon Labs Senior Product Marketing Manager: How Matter 1.3 will shape the future

Recently, Sami Kaislasuo, senior product marketing manager at Silicon Labs, wrote about how Matter 1.3 will shape the future. He discussed how IoT integration can reduce energy consumption in various industries, from smart buildings to industrial IoT and even smart home energy management, helping us move towards a more sustainable future.

Impact of buildings on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions

Buildings account for a large portion of the United States' energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. According to NREL, they account for 70% of U.S. electricity consumption, 40% of total energy consumption, and 30% of greenhouse gas emissions—that's a huge environmental footprint! These statistics are alarming, especially as our world works to transition to a net-zero future. Our desire for increasingly sophisticated and convenient devices drives a constant demand for more energy, which leads to higher bills, but technology offers solutions to manage this consumption without sacrificing modern lifestyles.

Through the integration of IoT, energy consumption can be reduced across a variety of industries, from smart buildings to Industrial IoT and even smart home energy management, helping us move towards a more sustainable future.

Harnessing the power of IoT for smarter energy use

As we work towards a more sustainable future, it’s important to turn our attention to energy management as an effective way to reduce overconsumption. This includes continuously monitoring and optimizing energy usage patterns, identifying areas where energy can be saved, and integrating renewable energy sources such as solar into the energy mix. All of these tasks can be very labor-intensive and time-consuming if done manually, but IoT can simplify and optimize them. Thanks to the new Matter 1.3 update, energy management, especially in homes and buildings, now operates according to Matter standards and is easier to manage.

Matter 1.3 opens up more devices for energy management

Today, most consumers have a hard time understanding their energy usage, yet are increasingly concerned about the impact on the environment. Matter's latest 1.3 update will allow users to automate their energy management and gain transparency into energy insights. With Matter 1.3, all devices connected to the cloud can report actual and estimated measurements in real time, including instantaneous power, voltage, current, and more, as well as their energy consumption or generation over time. Users can even remotely control the rate, schedule, and power of electric vehicle (EV) charging. This will save both homeowners and building managers the manual process of constantly monitoring energy and water systems.

Smart Cities: How the Internet of Things is Transforming Urban Energy Systems

As a major component of cities, buildings have a significant impact on the energy consumption of the entire community. Integrating the Internet of Things into the urban landscape is critical to addressing this collective use and promoting global energy reduction. Retail buildings and office spaces typically rely on one or more wired building automation systems (BAS) to control core building functions, mainly in terms of heating, air conditioning and ventilation.

Integration of IoT can create smart building management systems to facilitate on-demand, local equipment control to improve energy efficiency. Building facility managers can use smart submeters to track consumption by usage (e.g., lighting, HVAC, pumps), building structure (e.g., floor, wing, zone, parking), or any other useful criteria to provide segmented measurement data to better define operational plans and promote sustainability.

These always-on monitoring systems allow managers to immediately address energy misuse, thereby reducing costs and improving overall sustainability. Using IoT devices, facility managers can gain detailed insights into active energy consumption across various building operations. These smart sensors can help determine a building’s load characteristics and the equipment that causes higher energy consumption during peak demand hours. When high power consumption intersects with peak hours, IoT technology enables buildings with onsite renewable energy reserves or distributed energy resources (DER) to operate “off the grid.”

Industrial IoT: Optimizing output and reducing waste

Due to high energy demands, industrial workplaces can greatly benefit from advanced energy management. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems enable automated control and quick response to fluctuating energy demand and prices, resulting in increased efficiency and cost savings.

For example, airflow regulation in workplaces becomes easier with IIoT. With IoT, workplaces such as mines or factories can implement on-demand ventilation. Smart sensors can determine the best location to filter air and how much airflow is needed. Traditional systems ventilate the entire mine, including inoperable areas, but on-demand ventilation systems can direct air only where and when it is needed. This optimization can significantly reduce the electricity consumption of mining companies.

Home Energy Management

As with building management, submetering can be effectively applied to individual homes. Homeowners can receive real-time updates on energy usage, including peak times, and ultimately save money by limiting usage. Smart home devices can automate lighting, water supply, and heating and cooling systems. For example, sensors can detect when lights need to be turned off, or easily adjust indoor temperatures based on weather patterns and user preferences.

Charging electric vehicles at home overnight often causes stress on the grid, leading to cost spikes in some areas. However, with Matter 1.3, with IoT-driven energy management, the system will be able to take cost spikes into account to detect the best time to charge electric vehicles and other battery-powered devices, creating a more sustainable and cost-effective way to manage energy at home.

As governments push for more energy efficiency, device makers are being asked to adopt data-sharing standards that allow devices such as washing machines and thermostats to communicate with each other and the grid, ultimately saving energy. This fits into the industry's broader goal of making home energy management more interoperable, seamless and user-friendly.

Voltalis is a European energy management company that installs smart home energy management devices for heating and cooling appliances, allowing them to temporarily reduce consumption when needed. Voltalis also works with energy markets to respond to policy and regulation, grid stability and demand response.

Providing homeowners with consumption levels through real-time data reduces overall consumption and promotes sustainability. This facilitates optimization of EV charging loads – EVs can withstand not being charged for a period of time or being charged at a limited current, but the network cannot support them and may collapse if the load is much higher than production at a given time. Bidirectional control of consumption and production is essential to optimize the grid, and with energy management systems such as Voltalis, this becomes possible.

Additionally, energy-efficient appliances such as washing machines, tumble dryers, washer-dryers and dishwashers, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems can optimize their energy efficiency through use cases such as incentive-based power management, which limits consumption by providing financial incentives to save energy. Intelligent systems are able to track these consumption levels in real time, providing instant information for smart grid management and homeowners.

The way forward: energy management for a sustainable future

Automated energy management systems enable users to regulate, reduce, and gain valuable insights into their energy consumption. This means lower energy bills while promoting a more sustainable future. As energy management becomes more convenient and IoT connectivity expands, these solutions are being adopted across industries, beyond just buildings and homes.

In the future, we can expect energy management to continue to be seamlessly integrated into civil engineering, playing a key role in planning sustainable urban environments. Silicon Labs is eager to keep up with advancements and is helping customers, developers and manufacturers build safe, reliable, connected devices that support sustainable development goals.