OpenADR and Matter are collaborating to let your smart home talk to the grid
Key takeaways
- Connectivity Standards Alliance Open ADR and Matter are teaming up to make it easier for smart home appliances to talk to the energy grid.
- 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.
- 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.
Connectivity Standards Alliance Open ADR 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 Open ADR 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.