The Energy Challenge Facing Dutch Households
As energy costs continue to rise and the Netherlands pushes toward ambitious climate goals, Dutch households find themselves at the center of a complex energy transition. While the promise of smart energy management exists, current solutions remain prohibitively expensive, overly complex, or locked within proprietary ecosystems that limit user control and innovation.
The growing adoption of solar panels, electric vehicles, and home batteries creates new opportunities for energy optimization, but also new challenges. Homeowners need tools to coordinate these devices intelligently, maximizing renewable energy use while minimizing costs. Unfortunately, existing solutions often require significant upfront investments and technical expertise that put them out of reach for many families.
Introducing HHEMS: A New Approach
The Hybrid Home Energy Management System (HHEMS) represents a fundamentally different approach to home energy management. Built as an open-source platform at TU Delft and part of the Convergence initiative, the HHEMS project combines the accessibility of Raspberry Pi hardware with the extensive device support of Home Assistant, creating a solution that is both powerful and approachable.
What sets HHEMS apart is its hybrid nature. The platform can easily integrate with real hardware devices through Home Assistant's extensive ecosystem, while also providing sophisticated simulation capabilities for expensive and hard to acquire devices like solar panels, electric vehicles, battery systems, and more. This means researchers can test energy management algorithms without expensive hardware investments, and homeowners can experiment with different scenarios before committing to major purchases.
How HHEMS Works
At its core, HHEMS leverages Home Assistant's extensive ecosystem of device integrations. Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that runs on local hardware and supports thousands of different smart devices and services. This means the HHEMS platform can communicate with hundreds of different smart home devices and energy systems right out of the box. The system provides APIs that abstract away the complexity of hardware communication, allowing researchers to focus on energy optimization algorithms rather than low-level device control.
HHEMS incorporates a comprehensive simulation tool powered by DEMKit, a project developed by TU Twente which allows us to simulate energy devices such as solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and other smart home equipment. From an outside perspective of a researcher or household user, there is no difference between real and virtual devices during interaction with the platform. This seamless integration makes HHEMS particularly valuable for research and education, providing a realistic testing environment without the need for expensive physical hardware.
HHEMS System Architecture
Why HHEMS?
HHEMS serves two primary user groups: homeowners with smart home devices like solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles who want to optimize their energy usage and costs, and researchers who need a platform for developing and testing energy management algorithms without expensive hardware investments.
Looking Toward the Future
The current implementation of HHEMS represents just the beginning of our vision for democratized energy management. Future developments will focus on creating networks of connected households that can share energy and coordinate consumption patterns at the community level.
We envision neighborhoods where homes automatically share excess solar power, where electric vehicles serve as mobile energy storage for the community, and where centralized energy trading systems help optimize costs across multiple households. These connected communities will form the building blocks of self-sustaining virtual power plants that contribute to a more resilient and sustainable energy grid.
Mobile App Development
While Home Assistant provides powerful automation capabilities, its interface isn't always intuitive for everyday users and doesn't prioritize user experience for energy management tasks. To address this gap, we are developing a dedicated mobile app focused on user experience and ease of use. This app is being developed by 5 students as part of the CSE2000 software project course over a span of 10 weeks. The mobile app will provide an intuitive interface for homeowners to monitor their energy usage, control devices, and optimize their energy management strategies. More details will be added soon.
App Screenshots
Current Status
HHEMS is currently in active development as a research project at TU Delft. The platform is open-source and available on GitHub, where researchers, developers, and energy enthusiasts can explore the codebase, contribute improvements, and adapt the system for their own projects.
