How Car Companies Are Steering the Future Towards Smart Homes

On Tuesday, Honda revealed a smart home concept it claims can generate more energy than it consumes. It utilizes an ultra-efficient design that combines rooftop solar panels and energy-saving smart technology. It's certainly not the first building that boasts a negative carbon footprint, but it's one of the first dreamed up by a car company, and that's what makes this future-home interesting.

Why are automakers getting into the home automation game? Electric vehicles.

EVs seem to be the all-but inevitable future of private transportation, but the conundrum remains: Even though the battery-powered cars produce zero emissions, that power comes from an energy grid that still includes electricity generated by fossil fuels. Moreover, as the EV market booms, it's threatening to overwhelm our already congested energy grid.

Some carmakers think the automated home could provide a solution. The Honda Smart Home prototype functions like a hybrid of a mini-power plant and a tiny energy grid. It runs on renewable energy from rooftop solar photovoltaic panels, which provide power to the appliances and systems throughout the home—as well, of course, to the Honda Fit™ EV sitting in the garage. Much like the Fit, the smart home includes a 10 kWh lithium battery pack—a smaller version of the one powering the car—that can store up solar-generated power for later use, say at night or on cloudy days.

But the key element is Honda's Home Energy Management System (HEMS)—the brains of the operation. It manages the energy use to distribute power intelligently, maximizing efficiency by deciding when to pull from the battery pack and when to store up for later.

Since everything from heating and cooling system to the smart TV is network-connected and wifi-enabled, the HEMS brain can monitor how much electricity the home needs and when. It's also cost efficient, Honda claims; it knows that charging at night with renewable stored-up power is cheaper than paying for peak rates during the day. The system's also remotely controllable by the homeowner via a mobile app.

Honda predicts that this trifecta of sustainability can cut consumption by more than half; it estimates that while a regular home would consume about 13.3 megawatt-hours of electricity a year; the smart home generates about 2.6 megawatt-hours a year. And whatever's leftover is fed back into the grid to offset the extra demand from the electric vehicle.

In a nutshell, car companies—it's not just Honda—are starting to think of vehicles as essentially really big, power-gulping home appliances. Toyota, Telsa, and Ford are also experimenting with smart home micro-grid technology for their EVs, hoping for a solution that can encourage mainstream adoption of electric cars and also position the automakers as players in the nascent home automation industry.

The big question is, will the average home really begin to generate enough solar power to run the household, the vehicle, and have some leftover to contribute to a cleaner, greener future infrastructure? That's the million-dollar question, and why automakers and solar companies are starting to partner up: Honda with SolarCity, Ford with SunPower.

For its part, the Honda smart home is designed to include about twice as many solar panels as the average suburban consumer house, the New York Times reported, not to mention the experimental home is located in sunny California, at UC Davis, where researchers will spend a three-week trial studying and tweaking the system to see if it could work for everyday American homeowners.

A snapshot of Honda's Home Energy Management System smart features. Image:

Honda

There are a lot of factors that will determine whether or not the idea has legs—the weather in your location, the quality and size of the PV installation, your personal energy consumption, etc. Of course, Honda's home design leverages all the latest bells and whistles into net zero energy architecture: geothermal heating, south-facing windows for optimal sunlight, LEDs lighting supposedly five times more energy-efficient than conventional lights, a concrete alternative that takes less energy to heat during construction, and so on. This infographic lists them all in detail.

Honda started working on its smart home project last year, around the same time Ford launched its MyEnergi efficient household; an EV energy management initiative with KB Home construction. "More than ever, cars are sharing the same energy source as the home," Mike Tinskey, Ford's global director of Vehicle Electrification and Infrastructure said at the time. "The time is right for the home appliance and transportation sectors to converge if we are going to tackle a myriad of sustainability challenges in a rapidly changing world."