Matter to muster sustainability

“A sustainable world is only possible when homes start to interact with the grid of the future,” says Jai Thampi, Schneider Electric’s Senior Vice President Strategy & Innovation. “The grid of the future is not only more smart, it’s becoming sentient, self-aware and adapting, and that’s only possible when homes become more than a smart home — it has to be smart and sustainable.”

Thampi points out one obstacle — few people know that homes and home technologies are one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases. Schneider’s goal, then, he says, is to transform homes from merely ‘smart’ to ‘smart and sustainable’. To achieve this, he says, will require three inter-operating systems in homes of the future: the Smart Home System, the Energy System and the Sentient Grid of the Future.

Wiser thinking

Part of Schneider’s current offering is the Wiser smart home system, for which an Energy Centre solution available in some US states already allows interplay between the ‘grid side’ and the ‘plug side’. Every home is unique, notes Thampi, and if the various power loads for any given home can be identified as critical or non-critical, then different levels of device management can make the home both more efficient and more resilient against power outages. (Note that the Clipsal Wiser product line in Australia is related but substantially different.)

What’s the Matter?

But for such an ecosystem to work more widely it must be able to work with not only a single system, but multiple vendors and devices. An open-source system — interoperable and vendor-agnostic — will be needed to connect it all, so enabling everything to work together.

So Schneider is committing to be one of the first few companies in the world to offer native solutions for just such an open-source unified connectivity protocol, being developed under the name of ‘Matter’.

Building upon current IP protocols, Matter will eventually define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies allowing for device certification that should enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps and cloud services. No standard is yet approved, but Matter says it is using “best-in-class contributions from markettested smart home technologies such as those from Amazon, Apple, Google, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (formerly the Zigbee Alliance), and others”. Schneider wants its devices to be among the first group of Matter-compliant products released immediately after the standard is approved, including bridging its Wiser smart home ecosystem with Matter-connected systems as soon as they launch. The company is well-positioned to do so, since Schneider Electric is a board member of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) and an active contributor to the Matter protocol development.