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Customer Story

EnergyAlert Optimizes Efficiency Using IoT Technology

Dutch Energy monitoring company expands its capabilities with state-of-the-art IoT services and techniques

Related services
Cloud, AWS (Amazon Web Services)

Industry
Public and Utilities

Company
Oblivion | Part of Xebia

Specializing in energy consumption and monitoring solutions, Dutch-based EnergyAlert works both in the consumer and business market to help reduce energy use. The company was founded in 2004 in Apeldoorn. Its main focus is transitioning toward a sustainable future using renewable energy sources. EnergyAlert does this in part by giving its consumers insight into their energy consumption via email alerts, meter reading, monitoring and reports. Collecting this data results in ways that can help the consumer reduce energy consumption. Currently over 80,000 households and 100,000 businesses use EnergyAlert in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.

Why
Remain competitive using the latest available technologies
What
Monitor energy on a granular and large scale level
How
Employ AWS services to send data without requiring an internet connection

Going Granular

EnergyAlert was well aware that improvements in the way it monitored energy consumption were needed. Receiving data from metering companies via email simply wouldn’t cut it. Energy consumption and monitoring habits were continually changing as consumers were turning to a more granular way of looking at energy consumption. In other words, monitoring was being done more on a room-to-room level or through devices. EnergyAlert was already operating on AWS and would need to use Internet of Things (IoT) services and techniques to reach its goal of updating and scaling. Xebia’s knowledge of AWS and IoT proved to be the perfect combination when partnering with EnergyAlert on this project.

Across the Board Improvement

One of the main challenges for EnergyAlert was to keep digitally in touch. To do so they would need to design an infrastructure that would allow IoT devices to send necessary monitoring data without having to connect to the internet. This meant developing a viable, scalable ecosystem where each device needed a workable battery for a minimum of one year. The information is from the device then captured via various sensors and then sent to EnergAlert using AWS best practices including lifecycle policies, security, and durability. Xebia provided precisely the training and knowledge of serverless architectures needed for EnergyAlert to succeed.

“The new solution for EnergyAlert is a success. It grants granular monitoring to a massive amount of IoT devices. All requirements imposed were met, and the architectural design accounts for AWS best practices. The solution has proven to be highly available, scalable, cost-effective, and reliable.”
EnergyAlert
Paul Span CEO

Easy Energy Efficiency

EnergyAlert created a vast network of IoT devices that would give consumers the tools they needed to reduce energy consumption. Along with its existing AWS services including Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS MySQL, Xebia helped the company employ the use of LoraWAN technology. LoraWAN allows IoT devices to send consumption data without an internet connection or a large amount of power. The technology also enabled long-range communications which were then sent to a router. The LoraWAN stack sits atop Amazon EC2 and delivers messages using MQTT. The data sent is then securely stored on Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. The result was a seamless process that changed the game for EnergyAlert’s monitoring system.

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