OpenADR and Matter are teaming up to make it easier for smart home appliances to talk to the energy grid. This is a big deal, as Matter is the most popular smart home connectivity standard and OpenADR is a connectivity standard used by the actual energy grid. In other words, this should allow smart home devices to automatically communicate with the grid without any effort on your part.
What will this do for the consumer? It all falls down to demand response, which is a type of energy management that adjusts the demand in real time instead of the supply. This is already used by utility companies, as consumers can sign up for reduced energy bills by letting the provider change the temperature for a couple hours. This lets the company juggle demand across busy systems, instead of fiddling with supply.
Demand response is also baked into newer smart thermostats, as they can communicate directly with the grid to automatically make adjustments to prevent blackouts and the like. Thermostats are just one product category. This new effort should bring a lot of other smart home gadgets into the fold.
A big potential use case here is with EV chargers. If these devices can talk directly to a utility provider, it would be possible to find cheaper times to charge the car. This is a huge theoretical upgrade to just waiting until off-hours to plug in your vehicle.
Obviously, this will only be useful for high-energy appliances like EV chargers, HVAC systems, laundry dryers and water heaters. There has already been a way to do this, via the installation of a demand response box. However, today’s collaboration could eventually eliminate the need for these kinds of boxes, as the communication tech would be baked into the appliance itself.
We don’t have a timeline for any of this, as the formal liaison agreement just seeks to “accelerate the adoption of grid-connected residential energy management solutions.” Smart home enthusiasts will, eventually, love having a seamless pathway from the grid to each individual device.
