Ludger Hovestadt is a professor of Computer Aided Architectural Design at Zürich’s renowned ETH. His life mission is to investigate how computer technology and electronics can help to optimise buildings with a view to cutting energy consumption drastically whilst offering more user comfort to the people inside.
Balz Halter is a construction engineer and owner of several companies in the construction and real estate areas. His dream: home automation should become simple and affordable to a level that makes it as commonplace as the household fridge and the TV set.
Wilfried Beck founded his first company about 30 years ago and may be described as a pioneer in the field of industrial PCs. In 2000 he developed the first one-chip webserver — and an idea: if the control circuitry can be made small and cheap, every electrical appliance can have it fitted.
What do these people — and many others we can’t mention here — have in common? An ambitious goal: awarding intelligence to (almost any) household equipment and making it energy conscious to save the environment. A fascinating idea, to have a chip operating straight off he AC grid, consuming just 300 milliwatts and so small it fits in a chock block. A creative solution to an old problem: how to avoid too much interference when data is being sent over the domestic AC wiring?
With their international ‘digitalSTROM.org’ initiative professor Hovestadt, Wilfried Beck, Balz Halter and many like-minded people strive to achieve a breakthrough for home automation at the household equipment level. An amount of ‘intelligence’ distributed across many small chips may help to reduce the total standby power consumption of an average household to acceptable levels.
The digitalSTROM.org initiative is hereby nominated for the Elektor Foundation Award 2009. The award ceremony will take place during the Elektor Live! event on November 21, 2009 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
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