Crowdsourcing information via mobile devices as a migration enabler towards the SmartGrid

The high penetration of mobile devices is an indicator showing their impact to our daily life, witnessed via the diverse services offered through them. In the energy domain they can be used as a tool for bidirectional communication between the energy prosumers and the other envisioned actors in the SmartGrid. Most trials today require additional hardware installations at user's side in order to collect metering data and use it for energy optimization; however similar information can be acquired from the users and in many cases the quality of information may be comparative or better than the passive methods applied today (especially when considering estimated future user behavior). We believe that mobile devices can play a key role in user-assisted data acquisition and prediction, as well as empower approaches dealing with analytics, what-if simulations etc. In this capacity crowdsourcing energy information via the use of mobile devices can serve as an enabling technology until the SmartGrid and its services are fully deployed. We present here the key envisioned ideas, an architecture as well as a prototype implementation for their realization.