essay about smart house

Smart House System Technology Explained

Introduction, energy management, security system, lighting system, smart appliances, entertainment, emergency management.

Smart House is a term used to describe a house that has Computer Controlled Automation System that controls various functions in a house such as appliances and lighting. This system employs smart technology allowing for networking of appliances hence enabling access and operation of the appliances from any part of the network. The system can be used in monitoring, warning and carrying out various functions according to selected criteria. The smart technology enables automatic communication via the mobiles phones, the internet and the fixed telephones.

Smart technology makes use of different electronics components, performing different functions. These components are divided into the following general groups:

• Sensors: for monitoring and submitting any changes, examples are humidity sensor, smoke detectors, movement and heat sensors, thermometers etc.
• Actuators: These components perform physical actions; examples are automatic light switches, relays and door and window openers.
• Controllers: these components make choice based on occurrences and programmed rules.
• Central units: Used in programming and making changes to a system, a good example is a computer.
• Interface: These are components which help user to communicate with the system.

The most important aspects to be taken care of for a house to be considered smart are:

• Energy management
• Emergency management
• Smart appliances.

Smart houses are considered very efficient in energy management.Electronics devices are installed in the house to monitor the usage of the energy and the number of people in the house at a particular time for energy regulation. When there is no one in the house, the temperatures settings are lowered automatically and all the appliances and lights that are not in use are turned off. The energy management system also controls heating system, fans and air conditioners in a way that will save energy. The smart house energy system also automatically turns off energy from an outlet that is not being used.

Smart house energy management system helps in saving energy cost by up to 65% compared to a house where energy usage is controlled manually.

A smart house is far much secure as it is easy to protect making it hard to break in than the current house. Alarm systems, similar in application to car alarm are installed in a smart house. The security system put the house in security mode, automatically shutting all windows and doors.

The smart house security system is programmed for a single day use or for a long time when the owner of the house is in a long trip or vacation. In this case, the security system is set to open the curtains and turn on and off the lights, making it look like there is a person in the house.

As part of the security system, surveillance cameras are installed and hidden around the house. These camera are monitored over the internet and the house owner can check at all aspects of the house include burglars and other unusual happening around and inside the house.

Smart house employs lighting system that makes the house safe and easier to live in by use of programmable lights or remotely accessed lighting system. With programmable lighting system, the house owner programs the lights to come on of off at a specific time and even dim depending with the mood. A central computer is used to turn specific lights at a specific time during the night. This helps in deterring criminals, hence improving security. With remote access, lights can be controlled remotely from any where inside or outside the house using mobile phones or PDAs.

For a house to be considered smart, smart appliances are installed to make use of the smart technology. The appliances are networked in the system to perform specific task at a given time.

Examples of smart appliances include remote controlled coffee maker which brews coffee just before the house owner wakes up. The coffee maker is linked to an alarm to wake up the house owner when the coffee is ready. A smart refrigerator automatically adjusts the temperatures inside based on the temperature of food inside. These smart appliances are connected to a computer which automatically turns the appliances on and off.

Smart appliances make the life of people calmer and better structured as the technology make planning of the day easier. This tranquility help people to concentrate on a specific task as other tasks are being carried on without a lot of monitoring and intervention.

Smart entertainment systems are designed to controls the way home entertainment system including the TV and Home theatre system functions. Smart TV user have the ability to change channels by either speaking or accessing the TV via the internet, instructing it on what to record and at what time. Ultra Thin rear projections TVs have been developed using Digital Light Technology (DLP), they have massive screen sizes, and they are slim and light enough to hang on the wall.

Smart internet enabled home theatres system stream music from multiple computers on the internet and store in an internal hard drives. This home theatre can be accessed remotely over the internet to control almost all aspects of the system.

A smart house emergency system is designed in a way that it will inform house occupant where there is an emergency and at the same time contact the relevant authority on the emergency for a quick response. If there is fire for example, the fire detector sends a signal to the central computer which triggers the alarm and at the same time make a call to the fire department.

Another example is when there is a gas leakage in the house; the emergency control system will shut down the main gas supply and turn off all electrical appliances to prevent any fire out break. The system will then turn on the alarm and send a signal to the house owner informing them on the gas leak though the mobile phone or through the internet to a personal computer.

Smart houses are the choice for most people as they improve the lives of people in a great way making it easier to live because of the convenience and safety they offer. With automatic smart appliances, people are able to plan their time and concentrate on important tasks in their lives.

Chris D. Nugent (2006) Smart Home and Beyond, IOS Publishers, United States.

David Heckman (2008) A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day, Duke University Press, United Kingdom.

Richard Harper (2003) Inside the Smart Home, Springer Publishers, New York.

Smart House: Your wish is Their command, Web.

Smart House: The so called Sci-Fi Life, Web.

Smart House Designs, Web.

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Article Contents

Introduction, 1 smart-home definition, 2 smart-home infrastructures, 3 smart-home energy-management scheme, 4 technical challenges of smart homes, 5 conclusion, conflict of interest.

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Smart homes: potentials and challenges

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Rasha El-Azab, Smart homes: potentials and challenges, Clean Energy , Volume 5, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 302–315, https://doi.org/10.1093/ce/zkab010

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Decentralized distributed clean-energy sources have become an essential need for smart grids to reduce the harmful effects of conventional power plants. Smart homes with a suitable sizing process and proper energy-management schemes can share in reducing the whole grid demand and even sell clean energy to the utility. Smart homes have been introduced recently as an alternative solution to classical power-system problems, such as the emissions of thermal plants and blackout hazards due to bulk plants/transmission outages. The appliances, sources and energy storage of smart homes should be coordinated with the requirements of homeowners via a suitable energy-management scheme. Energy-management systems are the main key to optimizing both home sources and the operation of loads to maximize home-economic benefits while keeping a comfortable lifestyle. The intermittent uncertain nature of smart homes may badly affect the whole grid performance. The prospective high penetration of smart homes on a smart power grid will introduce new, unusual scenarios in both generation and loading. In this paper, the main features and requirements of smart homes are defined. This review aims also to address recent proposed smart-home energy-management schemes. Moreover, smart-grid challenges with a high penetration of smart-home power are discussed.

Smart homes provide comfortable, fully controlled and secure lifestyles to their occupants. Moreover, smart homes can save energy and money with the possibility of profiting from selling clean renewable energy to the grid. On the other hand, the probable decrease in total domestic-energy loads encourages many governments to support promising smart-home technologies. Some countries have already put out many rules, laws and subsidy programmes to encourage the integration of smart homes, such as encouraging the optimization of the heating system, supporting building energy storage and/or deploying smart meters. For instance, the European Standard EN 15232 [ 1 ] and the Energy Performance of Building Directive 2010/31/EU [ 2 ], which is in line with Directive 2009/72/EC as well as the Energy Road Map 2050 [ 3 ], encourage the integration of smart-home technologies to decrease power demand in residential areas.

To control the environment, a smart home is automated by controlling some appliances, such as those used for lighting and heating, based on different climatic conditions. Now, recent control schemes adapt many functions besides classical switching ones. They can monitor the internal environment and the activities of the home occupants. They also can independently take pre-programmed actions and operate devices in set predefined patterns, independently or according to the user’s requirements. Besides the ease of life, smart homes confirm efficient usage of electricity, lowering peak load, reducing energy bills and minimizing greenhouse-gas emissions [ 4 , 5 ].

Smart homes can be studied from many points of view. The communication systems [ 6 ], social impacts [ 7 ], thermal characteristics [ 8 ], technologies and trends of smart homes [ 9 ] are reviewed individually. Moreover, the monitoring and modelling of smart-home appliances via smart meters are reviewed for accurate load forecasting, as in [ 10 , 11 ]. Recently, power-grid authorities have modified residential electrical tariffs to encourage proper demand-side management by homeowners. Different from previous reviews, this paper introduces smart homes from the electrical/economic point of view. It also discusses smart-home energy-management systems (SHEMS) in two different modes, offline load scheduling and real-time management. The prospective impacts of unusual smart-home power profiles on future smart grids are also summarized.

After this introductory section, Section 1 describes the different definitions of smart homes within the last two decades. Smart-home communication schemes and other infrastructures of smart homes are discussed in Section 2. Section 3 discusses in more detail the existing functions of SHEMS, their pre-proposed optimization techniques and related technical/economical objective functions. The impacts of smart homes on modern grids are also discussed in Section 4. Finally, in Section 5, the main conclusions and contributions of the paper are highlighted.

The term ‘smart home’ has been commonly used for about two decades to describe houses with controlled energy schemes. This automation scheme confirms easier lifestyles for homeowners than normal un-automated homes, especially for elderly or disabled persons. Recently, the concept of ‘smart home’ has a wider description to include many applications of technologies in one place.

Sowah et al. [ 12 ] define smart homes as: ‘Houses that provide their occupants a comfortable, secure, and energy efficient environment with minimum possible costs regardless their occupants.’ The Smart Homes Association defines a smart home as: ‘The integration of technology and services through home networking for a better quality of living’ [ 13 ].

Makhadmeh et al. define them as: ‘Incorporated residential houses with smart technology to improve the comfort level of users (residents) by enhancing safety and healthcare and optimizing power consumption. Users can control and monitor smart-home appliances remotely through the home energy-management system (HEMS), which provides a remote monitoring system that uses telecommunication technology’ [ 14 ].

Smart homes can be defined as: any residential buildings using different communication schemes and optimization algorithms to predict, analyse, optimize and control its energy-consumption patterns according to preset users’ preferences to maximize home-economic benefits while preserving predefined conditions of a comfortable lifestyle.

Distributed clean energy generated by smart homes provides many benefits for prospective smart grids. Consequently, the effects of smart homes on future power grids should be extensively studied. In the near future, smart homes will play a major role as a power supplier in modern grids, not only as a power consumer.

The general infrastructure of smart homes consists of control centres, resources of electricity, smart meters and communication tools, as shown in Fig. 1 . Each component of the smart-home model will be discussed in the following subsections.

Infrastructure of SHEMS source

2.1 The control centre

The control centre provides home users with proper units to monitor and control different home appliances [ 15 ]. All real-time data are collected by SHEMS to optimize the demand/generation coordination and verify the predefined objectives. The main functions of the control centre can be summarized as follows [ 15 ]:

(i) collecting data from different meters, homeowners’ commands and grid utility via a proper communication system;

(ii) providing proper monitoring and analysing of home-energy consumption for homeowners;

(iii) coordinating between different appliances and resources to satisfy the optimal solution for predefined objectives.

2.2 Smart meter

The smart meter receives a demand-response signal from power utilities as an input to the SHEMS system [ 16 , 17 ]. Recently, advanced smart-metering infrastructures can monitor many home features such as electrical consumption, gas, water and heating [ 18 ].

2.3 Appliances

Smart-home loads can be divided according to their operating nature into two categories: schedulable and non-schedulable loads. Non-schedulable loads are operated occasionally according to the homeowner’s desires without any predictable operating patterns, such as printers, televisions and hairdryers, whereas schedulable loads have a predictable operating pattern that can be shifted or controlled via SHEMS, such as washing machines and air conditioners [ 19 ].

According to [ 19 ], controllable devices are also classified into interruptible and non-interruptible load according to the effect of supply interruption on their tasks. Electric vehicles (EVs) can be considered as an exceptional load [ 20 , 21 ]. EVs have two operating modes: charging and discharging. Therefore, EVs are interruptible schedulable loads during the charging mode. Moreover, EV battery energy can also be discharged to supply power to the grid during critical events, which is known as vehicle-to-grid [ 22 ]. By SHEMS, EVs can participate in supplying loads during high-priced power periods. In low-priced power periods, EVs restore their energy from the grid [ 23 , 24 ].

2.4 Resources of electricity

Solar and wind plants are the most mature renewable-energy sources in modern grids. Nowadays, many buildings have installed photovoltaic (PV) modules, thermal solar heaters or micro wind turbines. For smart homes, various functions can be supplied by solar energy besides generating electricity, such as a solar water heater (SWH), solar dryer and solar cooler [ 25 ]. Moreover, PV plants are cheap with low requirements of maintenance [ 26 ], whereas hot water produced by SWHs can be used in many home functions, such as washing and cooking, which increases the home-energy efficiency [ 27 ].

Energy storage may be considered as the cornerstone for any SHEMS. SHEMS are usually installed with energy-storage systems (ESSs) to manage their stored energy according to predefined objectives. Many energy-storage technologies are available in the power markets. Batteries and fuel cells are the most compatible energy-storage types of smart-home applications [ 28 ]. A fuel-cell structure is very similar to a battery. During the charging process, hydrogen fuel cells use electricity to produce hydrogen. Hydrogen feeds the fuel cell to create electricity during the discharging process. Fuel cells have relatively low efficiency compared to batteries. Fuel cells provide extra clean storage environments with the capability of storing extra hydrogen tanks. That perfectly matches isolated homes in remote areas [ 29 ].

Although wind energy is more economical for large-scale plants, it has a very limited market for micro wind turbines in homes. Typically, micro wind turbines require at least a wind speed of 2.7 m/s to generate minimum power, 25 m/s for rated power and 40 m/s for continuous generated power [ 30 ]. A micro wind turbine is relatively expensive, intermittent and needs special maintenance requirements and constraints compared to a solar plant [ 31 ].

Recently, biomass energy has been a promising renewable resource alternative for smart homes. Many pieces of research have recommended biomass energy for different types of buildings [ 32 ]. Heating is the main function of biomass in smart homes, as discussed in [ 33 , 34 ]. In addition, a biomass-fuelled generation system is examined for many buildings [ 35 , 36 ].

2.5 Communication schemes

Recently, communication systems are installed as built-in modules in smart homes. Both home users and grid operators will be able to monitor and control several home appliances in the near future to satisfy the optimum home-energy profile while preserving a comfortable lifestyle. Therefore, both wired and wireless communication schemes are utilized, which is known as a home area network (HAN), to cover remote-control signals as home occupants’ ones. Fig. 1 shows an example of a HAN that consists of Wi-Fi and cloud computing networks for both indoor and outdoor data exchange, respectively [ 37 , 38 ].

Energy-management systems for homes require three main components: the computational embedded controllers, the local-area network communication middleware and the transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) communication for wide-area integration with the utility company using wide-area network communication [ 37 ].

According to home characteristics, many wired communication schemes can be selected, such as power-line communication (PLC), inter-integrated circuit (I2C) and serial peripheral interface or wireless technologies such as Zigbee, Wi-Fi, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to develop HANs. A few of the most common techniques will be discussed briefly in the following subsections [ 38 ].

PLC is a technique that uses power lines to transmit both power and data via the same cable to customers simultaneously. Such wired schemes provide fast communication with low interference of data. Moreover, PLC provides many communication terminals, as all power plugs can be used for data transferring. As all electrical home devices are connected by power cables, PLC can communicate with all these devices via the same cable.

PLC set-up has a low cost, as it uses pre-installed power cables with minimum hardware requirements. With a PLC communication scheme, home controllers can also be integrated easily with a high speed of data transfer. On the other hand, PLC has a high probability of data-signal attenuation. Furthermore, data signals suffer from electromagnetic interference of transmitted power signals.

2.5.2 Zigbee

Zigbee is a wireless communication technique [ 37–46 ]. Zigbee follows the IEEE 802.15.4 standard as a radio-frequency wireless communication scheme. It does not require any licenses for limited zones such as homes [ 37 ]. Also, Zigbee is a low-power-consuming technique. Therefore, it is suitable for basic home appliances, such as lighting, alarm systems and air conditioners [ 39 , 40 ]. Zigbee usually considers all home devices as slaves with a master coordinator/controller, which is known as a master–slave architecture.

Zigbee provides highly secured transferred data [ 38 , 41 ] with high reliability and capacity [ 42 ]. It also has self-organizing capabilities [ 42 ]. Conversely, Zigbee is relatively expensive due to special hardware requirements with low data-transfer rates. Moreover, Zigbee is not compatible with many other protocols, such as internet-supported protocols and Wi-Fi.

2.5.3 Wi-Fi technology

Wi-Fi is a wireless communication technique that follows the IEEE 802.11 standard. Wi-Fi provides high-rate data transfer that is compatible with many information-based devices such as computers, laptops, etc. [ 43 , 44 ].

Wi-Fi is a highly secured scheme with many of the familiar internet capabilities and low data-transfer delays (<3 ms) [ 45 ]. On the contrary, it is a relatively high-power-consuming scheme compared to Zigbee schemes [ 45 ]. Also, home devices can affect transmitted data signals by their emitted electromagnetic fields [ 46 ]. Wi-Fi can also suffer from interference from other communication protocols such as Zigbee and Bluetooth [ 43 ].

RFID is a wireless communication technique that conforms to the electronic product code protocol [ 47–52 ]. It can coincide with other communication schemes such as Wi-Fi and Zigbee. It can be utilized for a relatively widespread range of frequencies, from 120 kHz to 10 GHz. It also covers a wide range of distances, from 10 cm to 200 m [ 48 ]. Many researchers are investigating RFID home applications, such as energy-management systems [ 49 ], door locks [ 50 ] and lighting controls [ 51 ].

RFID operates on tags and reader-identification systems with a high data-transfer rate. Nevertheless, RFID has expensive chips with low bandwidth. The possibility of tag collision within the same zone decreases the accuracy of the RFID scheme.

This scheme connects home devices, users and grid operators via the internet to monitor and manage smart homes [ 6 , 38 , 53–65 ]. Consequently, the IoT and cloud computing have proven to be cheap, popular and easy services for smart homes. Moreover, IoT schemes are compatible with many other communication protocols, such as Zigbee, Bluetooth, etc., as listed in Table 1 . Internet hacking is the main problem with IoT schemes. System security and privacy are critical challenges for such internet-based schemes.

IoT protocols features

Today, building energy-management systems (BEMS) are utilized within residential, commercial, administration and industrial buildings. Moreover, the integration of variable renewable-energy sources with proper ESSs deployed in buildings represents an essential need for reliable, efficient BEMS.

For small-scale residential buildings or ‘homes’, BEMS should deal with variable uncertain load behaviours according to the home occupants’ desires and requirements, which is known as SHEMS. Throughout recent decades, many SHEMS have been presented and defined in many research studies.

In [ 66 ], SHEMS are defined as services that efficiently monitor and manage electricity generation, storage and consumption in smart houses. Nazabal et al. [ 67 ] include a collaborative exchange between smart homes and the utility as a main function of SHEMS. In [ 68 ], SHEMS are defined from the electrical-grid point of view as important tools that provide several benefits such as flattening the load curve, a reduction in peak demand and meeting the demand-side requirements.

3.1 Functions of SHEMS

Adaptive SHEMS are required to conserve power, especially with the increasing evolution in home loads. SHEMS should control both home appliances and available energy resources according to the real-time tariff and home user’s requirements [ 4 ]. Home-management schemes should provide an interface platform between home occupants and the home controller to readjust occasionally the load priority [ 5 ].

As shown in Fig. 2 , the majority of smart-home centres can be summarized as having five main functions [ 5 ], as follows:

Functions of SHEMS

(i) Monitoring: provides home residents with visual instantaneous information about the consumed power of different appliances and the status of several home parameters such as temperature, lights, etc. Furthermore, it can guide users to available alternatives for saving energy according to the existing operating modes of different home appliances.

(ii) Logging: collects and saves data pertaining to the amount of electricity consumed by each appliance, generated out of energy-conservation states. This functionality includes analysing the demand response for real-time prices.

(iii) Control: both direct and remote-control schemes can be implemented in smart homes. Different home appliances are controlled directly by SHEMS to match the home users’ desires, whereas other management functions are controlled remotely via cell phones or laptops, such as logging and controlling the power consumption of interruptible devices.

(iv) Management: the main function of SHEMS. It concerns the coordination between installed energy sources such as PV modules, micro wind turbines, energy storage and home appliances to optimize the total system efficiency and/or increase economic benefits.

(v) Alarms: SHEMS should respond to specific threats or faults by generating proper alarms according to fault locations, types, etc.

3.2 Economic analysis

Economic factors affecting home-management systems are classified into two classes. First, sizing costs include expanses of smart-home planning. Second, operating costs consist of bills of consumed energy. These costs depend mainly on the electrical tariff.

3.2.1 Sizing costs

These include capital, maintenance and replacement costs of smart-home infrastructures, such as PV systems, wind turbines, batteries/fuel cells and communication systems. In most previous SHEMS, such planning costs usually are not taken into consideration, as management schemes usually concern the daily operating costs only [ 69 ].

3.2.2 Operating costs

The electricity tariff is the main factor that gives an indication of the value of saving energy, according to the governmental authority; there are many types of tariffs, as follows [ 70–74 ]:

(i) Flat tariffs: the cost of consumed energy is constant regardless of the continuous change in the load. Load-rescheduling schemes do not affect the electricity bills in this scheme. Therefore, homeowners are not encouraged to rearrange their consumed energy, as they have no any economic benefits from managing the consumption of their appliances.

(ii) Block-rate tariffs: in this scheme, the monthly consumed energy price is classified into different categories. Each category has its own flat-rate price. Therefore, the main target of SHEMS is minimizing the total monthly consumed energy to avoid the risk of high-priced categories.

(iii) Seasonal tariffs: in this scheme, the total grid-demand load is changed significantly from one season to another. Therefore, the utility grid applies a high flat-rate tariff in high-demand seasons and vice versa. SHEMS should minimize the total consumption in such high-priced seasons and get the benefit of consumption in low-priced seasons.

(iv) Time-of-use (TOU) tariff: there are two or three predefined categories of tariffs daily in this scheme. First, a high-priced-hours tariff is applied during high-demand hours, which is known as a peak-hours tariff. Second, an off-peak-hours tariff is applied during low-demand hours with low prices for energy consumption. Sometimes, three levels of pricing are defined by the utility grid during the day, i.e. off-, middle- and high-peak costs, as discussed in [ 75 ]. SHEMS shift interruptible loads with low priority to off-peak hours to minimize the bill.

(v) Super peak TOU: this can be considered as a special case of the previously described TOU tariff but with a short peak-hours period of ~4 hours daily.

(vi) Critical peak pricing (CPP): the utility grid uses this tariff scheme during expected critical events of increasing the gap between generation and power demand. The price is increased exceptionally during these critical events by a constant predefined rate.

(vii) Variable peak pricing: this is a subcategory of the CPP tariff in which the exceptional increase in the tariff is variable. The utility grid informs consumers of the exceptional dynamic price increase according to its initial expectations.

(viii) Real-time pricing (RTP): the price is changing continuously during pre-identified intervals that range from several minutes to an hour. This tariff is the riskiest pricing scheme for homeowners. The electricity bill can increase significantly without a proper management system. SHEMS should communicate with grid utility and reschedule both home appliances, sources and energy storage continuously to minimize the total bill.

(viii) Peak-time rebates (PTRs): a proper price discount is considered for low-consumption loads during peak hours, which can be refunded later by the grid.

Depending on the electricity tariff, SHEMS complexity varies dramatically. In the case of using a flat-rate tariff, the algorithm becomes simpler, as one value is recorded for selling or buying the electricity. Tariffs may be published from the proper authority or predicted according to historical data. Prediction of the dynamic tariff is a main step in any SHEMS. Many time frames of tariff prediction are proposed that vary from hourly, daily or even a yearly prediction. Many optimization techniques with various objective functions are proposed to handle different features of both smart-home infrastructures and electricity tariffs, as will be discussed in the following section.

3.3 Pre-proposed SHEMS

Different SHEMS may be classified according to four features: operational planning of load-scheduling techniques, system objective functions, optimization techniques and smart-home model characteristics, as will be discussed in the following subsections.

3.3.1 Load-scheduling techniques

SHEMS concern the generation/load power balance to provide a comfortable lifestyle with the minimum possible costs. Scheduling loads according to their priority and the periods of renewable energy (solar, wind and EV state) can help in reducing the overall energy consumption daily. According to data collected by the management system, an initial load schedule is suggested daily to minimize the daily cost of consumed energy [ 76 ].

By using a proper optimal scheduling algorithm, electricity bills can be reduced by shifting loads from high-priced to low-priced intervals [ 77 , 78 ]. Many techniques have been proposed for home load scheduling, as will be discussed in the following subsections:

(i) Rule-based scheduling: in this algorithm, all home appliances and resources are connected to smart data-collector taps. By processing the collected data, different appliances are scheduled according to their priorities and based on the if/then rule. Also, some high-priority loads are supplied by home renewable sources/storage to maintain their function during predicted peak hours [ 79 , 80 ].

(ii) Artificial intelligence (AI): many AI controllers have been proposed for home load scheduling, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), fuzzy logic (FL) and adaptive neural fuzzy inference systems (ANFISs). Table 2 compares between the three types of scheduling scheme based on AI.

Optimization techniques for load scheduling

3.3.2 Objective functions

(i) Single-objective techniques: in these schemes, only one criterion is minimized or maximized according to the home-user requirements. Several minimization objective functions were proposed, as follows:

lifetime degradation [ 47–49 ];

life-cycle costs [ 93 ];

gas emissions [ 94–96 ];

both active and reactive losses [ 97 , 98 ].

On the other hand, some research defined other single maximizing objective functions, such as:

net present value [ 96 ].

economic profits [ 97 , 98 ].

increased system reliability: according to many well-known reliability indices, such as loss of power supply probability, loss of load probability and others [ 99 , 100 ].

generated power [ 101 , 102 ].

loadability [ 103 ];

Multi-objective techniques: homeowners may have several criteria to be optimized together. Multi-objective optimization (MOO) problems consider many functions simultaneously. MOO finds a proper coordination that moderately satisfies the considered objectives. In [ 102 ], SHEMS with MOO techniques are summarized. Table 3 lists some examples of such multi-objective functions.

Multi-objective functions of SHEMS

3.3.3 Optimization techniques

Optimization techniques aim usually to identify the best coordination taking into consideration predefined constraints. Many approaches are available for addressing optimization problems. These approaches can be classified into two categories: classical and AI-based techniques. Table 4 lists various SHEMS optimization techniques and their main features.

Optimization techniques in SHEMS

Classical methods, especially linear programming types, have been usually applied in the last decade for smart homes with limited objective functions and simple model characteristics of tariff and home appliances. Recently, AI-based techniques have been proposed to cover more complicated models of smart homes with multi-objective functions with high levels of comfortable lifestyles.

3.3.4 Home-model characteristics

The smart-home model differs significantly according to three factors: installed variable energy sources, applied tariff and EV deployment. PV systems have been applied for nearly all studied smart homes due to their low price, simplicity of installation, low maintenance requirements and easily predicted daily power profile. On the other hand, a few pieces of research have considered micro wind turbines in their home models, such as [ 120 ]. Wind turbines are limited by high-wind-speed zones that are usually located in rural areas. In addition, homeowners usually do not prefer wind turbines due to their high prices, mechanical maintenance requirements and the unpredictable variation in wind power.

Dynamic tariffs are applied in most smart-home research. Specifically, the TOU tariff is analysed in a lot of studies, such as [ 121 , 122 ], whereas little research uses RTP, such as [ 123 , 124 ]. EV is studied as an energy source in the parking period or vehicle-to-grid (V2G) mode. In [ 75 , 125 ], EV in V2G mode reduces the electricity bill in peak hours, whereas, in [ 126–130 ], ESSs are managed only to reduce the electricity usage from the grid.

Many technical challenges arise for modern grids due to the increasing mutual exchange between smart homes and utility grids, especially power-quality control. Electric-power-quality studies usually confirm the acceptable behaviour of electrical sources such as voltage limits and harmonics analysis. Recently, smart power grids have diverse generation sources from different technologies that depend mainly on power electronics devices that increase the difficulty in power-quality control. Power-quality constraints should be taken into consideration for any energy-management systems to provide harmony between modern sources and loads.

On the other hand, power-quality issues should not form an additional obstacle against the integration of new technologies in modern grids. Therefore, both advanced communication schemes and AI-based techniques make modern grids ‘smart’ enough to cope with selective power-quality management. Smart homes exchange power with utility grids. With the prospective increase in such smart homes, the effect of their behaviour should be studied and controlled. Smart homes affect the grid-power quality in three different areas, as will be discussed in the following paragraphs [ 154–156 ].

4.1 Generating equipment

Integrated micro generation schemes in smart homes are mainly single-phase sources based on inverters with high switching frequencies that reach to many kHz. Low-order harmonics of such a generation type can usually be disregarded. However, with the expected continuous increase in such micro generators, the harmonics of low-voltage networks may shift into a range of higher frequencies, perhaps from 2 to 9 kHz [ 157 ]. Therefore, more research is needed to re-evaluate the appropriate limits for generation equipment in smart homes. Moreover, single-phase generation increases the risk of an unbalanced voltage in low-voltage grids. Therefore, negative-sequence voltage limits should be re-evaluated particularly for weak distribution networks. Also, a need for zero-sequence voltage limits may arise [ 154 ].

4.2 Home appliances

Modern home appliances depend mainly on electronic devices, such as newer LED lighting systems, EV battery chargers, etc., with relatively low fundamental current and high harmonic contents compared to traditional ones. According to many power-system analysers, many harmonics will increase significantly to risky levels, particularly fifth-harmonic voltage, with increase in such new electronic appliances [ 155 ].

4.3 Distribution network

In future grids, significant unusual operating scenarios may be possible with high penetration of domestic generation, especially with the possibility of an islanded (self-balanced) operation of smart homes. Short-circuit power will differ significantly during different operating conditions compared to classical grids. Moreover, low-voltage networks may suffer from damping-stability problems due to the continuous decrease in resistive loads, in conjunction with the increase in capacitive loads of electronic equipment. In addition, resonance problems may occur with low frequencies according to the continuous change in the nature of the load [ 156 ].

Although smart homes have bad impacts on utility grids, there are no charges applied from the grid authority to homeowners based on their buildings’ effects on grid-power quality. Therefore, home planners and SHEMS designers are usually concerned only with the economic benefits of their proposed schemes.

Smart homes, using new revolutions in communication systems and AI, provide residential houses with electrical power of a dual nature, i.e. as producer and consumer or ‘prosumer’. The energy-management system includes many components that mainly depend on a suitable communication scheme to coordinate between available sources, loads and users’ desire. Among many proposed communication systems, the IoT has many advantages and was chosen in many studies. Besides the popularity of the IoT, it does not need any special equipment installation and is compatible with many other communications protocols.

Many functions are applied by management systems such as monitoring and logging to facilitate a proper interaction between home occupants and the management scheme. Home security also should be confirmed via the management scheme by using different alarms corresponding to preset threats. Home users control different home appliances according their desires by SHEMS and via cell phones or manually.

The electricity tariff plays an important role in defining management-system characteristics. Tariffs vary from simple fixed flat rates to complicated variable dynamic ones according to the electrical-grid authority’s rules for residential loads. According to the tariff and selected objective functions, pre-proposed optimization techniques vary significantly from simple classical linear programming to sophisticated AI ones.

Modern electronic-based home appliances increase power-grid-quality problems, such as high harmonic contents, unbalanced loading and unpredictable short-circuit currents. On the other hand, power-grid authorities do not charge homeowners according to their buildings’ effects on the power quality. Therefore, all proposed energy-management systems are concerned mainly with the economic profits from reducing electricity consumption or even selling electrical power to the utility grids. In the future, price-based power-quality constraints should be defined by the grid authorities to confirm proper power exchange between both smart homes and grids. A possible future direction is behaviour modelling of aggregated smart homes/smart cities in different operating scenarios to conclude probable power-grid scenarios for stability and quality.

This work was supported by the project entitled ‘Smart Homes Energy Management Strategies’, Project ID: 4915, JESOR-2015-Cycle 4, which is sponsored by the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT), Cairo, Egypt.

None declared.

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What Is a Smart Home?

How smart homes work, smart home systems, how to create a smart home.

• Pros and Cons
• Smart Home FAQs

The Bottom Line

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Smart Home: Definition, How They Work, Pros and Cons

Adam Hayes, Ph.D., CFA, is a financial writer with 15+ years Wall Street experience as a derivatives trader. Besides his extensive derivative trading expertise, Adam is an expert in economics and behavioral finance. Adam received his master's in economics from The New School for Social Research and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in sociology. He is a CFA charterholder as well as holding FINRA Series 7, 55 & 63 licenses. He currently researches and teaches economic sociology and the social studies of finance at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Investopedia / Mira Norian

A smart home refers to a convenient home setup where appliances and devices can be automatically controlled remotely from anywhere with an internet connection using a mobile or other networked device. Devices in a smart home are interconnected through the internet, allowing the user to control functions such as security access to the home, temperature, lighting, and a home theater remotely.

Key Takeaways

• A smart home allows homeowners to control appliances, thermostats, lights, and other devices remotely using a smartphone or tablet through an internet connection.
• Smart homes can be set up through wireless or hardwired systems.
• Smart home technology provides homeowners with convenience and cost savings.
• Security risks and bugs continue to plague makers and users of smart home technology.
• Though full-scale home automation may cost thousands of dollars, smaller individual products costing less than $100 can get homeowners started on smart home products.

A smart home’s devices are connected with each other and can be accessed through one central point—a smartphone , tablet, laptop, or game console. Door locks, televisions, thermostats, home monitors, cameras, lights, and even appliances such as the refrigerator can be controlled through one home automation system. The system is installed on a mobile or other networked device, and the user can create time schedules for certain changes to take effect.

Smart home appliances come with self-learning skills so they can learn the homeowner’s schedules and make adjustments as needed. Smart homes enabled with lighting control allow homeowners to reduce electricity use and benefit from energy-related cost savings. Some home automation systems alert the homeowner if any motion is detected in the home when they're away, while others can call the authorities—police or the fire department—in case of imminent situations.

Once connected, services such as a smart doorbell, smart security system, and smart appliances are all part of the internet of things (IoT) technology, a network of physical objects that can gather and share electronic information.

Security and efficiency are the main reasons behind the increase in smart home technology use.

Smart homes can feature either wireless or hardwired systems—or both. Wireless systems are easier to install. Putting in a wireless home automation system with features such as smart lighting, climate control, and security can cost several thousand dollars, making it very cost-friendly.

The downside to wireless systems is you likely need strong Wi-Fi coverage and broadband service throughout your entire house. This may require you to invest in range extenders or hardwired wireless access points. Wireless smart home systems are generally more appropriate for smaller existing homes or rental properties due to their smaller size.

Hardwired systems, on the other hand, are considered more reliable and are typically more difficult to hack. A hardwired system can increase the resale value of a home. In addition, hardwired smart home systems can easily be scaled; therefore, it is often the default method when designing a new build or performing a major renovation.

There is a drawback—it's fairly expensive. Installing a luxury and hardwired smart system can cost homeowners tens of thousands of dollars. In addition, you must have space for network hardware equipment including Ethernet cables.

Smart home products now allow for greater control over heating devices including when products are turned on, turned off, and controlled. Smart products may be armed with temperature or humidity sensors to automatically turn on or off if certain criteria are met. This line of smart home innovations also extends to air conditioners.

Often with the use of a mobile phone, table, or custom remote specific to a product, lighting products now enhance the capabilities of homeowners. Lights can be switched on and off, placed on a schedule, or set to change based on sunrise or sunset times. Like some more traditional products, lights can often set to change based on motion. Smart bulbs can communicate over Wi-Fi and display statistics or metrics to your phone.

This lighting category may also contain smart home products that control or prevent light. Automatic blinds may be installed and set to close based on sunrise schedules. Alternatively, electronic curtains allow users to manage their blinds using a handheld device.

Audio/Visual

One of the more fun aspects of smart homes, many entertainment products are now heavily connected to each other and can be controlled with a single remote. Television and speakers now have greater capabilities to be played on command using applications, including being maintained on a schedule or being voice-controllable.

One of the most reasonable aspects of a smart home is the enhanced security capabilities. Many products now have camera capabilities that track motion, capture video, or allow for live video feeds. This may be installed to sync with a ringing doorbell or set to display on certain areas of your property. These videos may allow for video-calling with the individual at your door, including audio capabilities.

Many smart homes are also refit with modern security kits. This includes motion sensor detectors when individuals should not be home, home monitoring, notifications and alerts of suspicious behavior, and the ability to lock doors or windows remotely using a phone.

A very large section of smart homes relates to digital assistants or home hubs. These products are often interacted with using your voice and can take commands, field questions, organize your calendar, schedule conference calls , or provide alerts. Though not specifically related to one's home, these digital assistants provide a broad range of controlling smart assets, their schedules, and their statuses.

Smart smoke and carbon monoxide detectors not only sound an alarm but can be synced to your phone to alert you should you be away from your property. These devices can often be set up to send emergency notifications to specified contacts.

Automated irrigation systems have had the ability to be programmed for a while. Now, smart irrigation systems field climate and environmental conditions an factor those traits into existing water schedules. Smart irrigation systems monitor moisture-related conditions and strive to conserve water.

When budgeting for smart home products, consider any required or necessary labor/installation costs from professionals.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Smart Homes

Installing a smart home technology system provides homeowners with convenience. Rather than controlling appliances, thermostats, lighting, and other features using different devices, homeowners can control them all using one device—usually a smartphone or tablet.

Since they're connected to a portable device, users can get notifications and updates on issues in their homes. For instance, smart doorbells allow homeowners to see and communicate with people who come to their doors even when they're not at home. Users can set and control the internal temperature, lighting, and appliances as well.

For the cost of setting up the smart system, homeowners can benefit from significant cost savings . Appliances and electronics can be used more efficiently, lowering energy costs.

While the smart home offers convenience and cost savings, there are still challenges. Security risks and bugs continue to plague makers and users of the technology. Adept hackers, for example, can gain access to a smart home's internet-enabled appliances. For example, in October 2016, a botnet called Mirai infiltrated interconnected devices of DVRs, cameras, and routers to bring down a host of major websites through a denial of service attack , also known as a DDoS attack.

Measures to mitigate the risks of such attacks include protecting smart appliances and devices with a strong password, using encryption when available, and only connecting trusted devices to one's network.

As noted above, the costs of installing smart technology can run anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a wireless system to tens of thousands of dollars for a hardwired system. It's a heavy price to pay, especially since there may be a steep learning curve to get used to the system for everyone in the household.

Smart Homes

Are often more convenient than traditional methods of scheduling, controlling, or accessing products

May enhance security due to notifications or alerts

Offers multiple ways of performing a certain task (i.e. lights can be manually turned on or scheduled)

May result in long-term cost savings when considering efficient energy use

May pose security risk as products are connected to networks and can be hacked

May require additional work for homeowner to track additional passwords and monitor product security

Are often more expensive than their less smart counterpart products

May result in steep learning curve, especially for those not technologically-savvy

Home Much Does a Smart Home Cost?

On one hand, more and more smart home products being brought to market will continually put pressure on manufacturers, competition, and product prices. On the other hand, these incredible innovations are continually expanding what they are capable of and may be assessed price premiums. When considering smart home products, perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the price exceeds the convenience.

According to HomeAdvisor, it may cost up to $15,000 to fully automate a four-bedroom, three-bath home. Average total home automation costs is just under $800, though fully-connected luxury homes may run into the six figures.

In general, a smart home can start by being very focused on a specific product or room. This strategy allows individuals to invest in smart technology for minimal capital. Consider the following options priced at less than $100 as of April 2024:

• Google Nest Mini, the home audio and assistant device
• Amazon Smart Plug, a method of automating appliances
• Ring Smart Doorbell, a video-enabled camera for home security
• Wyze Thermostat, a digital, wireless, programmable heating device

What Is In a Smart Home?

Smart homes can choose to have smart speakers, lights, thermostats, doorbells, or home hubs. Smart technology can also extend to kitchen appliances or outdoor or landscaping equipment. New innovations are continually evolving what is in a smart home.

Why Is a Smart Home Important?

A smart home is important because it allows a household to become more energy efficient. In addition, it allows a household to save time and perform tasks more efficiently. A smart home is important because of the convenience it provides over traditional methods of performing tasks.

Can a Smart Home Be Hacked?

Yes. Because home automation often requires a live network connect, home automation systems can be hacked if the security protocol of the smart home product has inadequate security protocols. In addition, individuals must take additional care to not share or disclose sensitive log-in information as these devices may require a password or personal device access to control.

Is a Smart Home Worth It?

Investing in a smart home is a cost-benefit analysis that often requires an upfront investment to equip your house with the appropriate products. In addition, there is the cost of needing to train yourself and become competent in understanding how to use the products. However, the benefits of saving time performing tasks as well as potential utility cost savings may make a smart home worth it.

Leveraging innovation and technology, smart homes make it easier to do things. Whether it is controlling applications using your phone or scheduling products to perform tasks at certain times, smart homes have revolutionized the way individuals do things, consume energy, and interact with their home products.

Stolojescu-Crisan, Cristina and et al. " An IoT-Based Smart Home Automation System ." Sensors (Basel) , vol. 21, no. 11, June 2021.

Setayeshfar, Omid and et al. " Privacy Invasion via Smart-Home Hub in Personal Area Networks ." Pervasive and Mobile Computing , vol. 85, September 2022.

Antonakakis, Manos and et al. " Understanding the Mirai Botnet ." Proceedings of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2017, pp. 1093-1110.

HomeAdvisor. " How Much Does a Smart Home Cost? "

Google. " Nest Mini ."

Amazon. " Amazon Smart Plug | Works with Alexa ."

Ring. " Ring's Best-Selling Doorbell ."

Wyze. " Wyze Thermostat ."

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How to Design Smart Homes? 8 Tips for Incorporating Domotics Into Architecture

• Written by José Tomás Franco
• Published on February 15, 2021

Home automation has long been associated with high costs, a burdening assembly time, and a cumbersome process that impelled us to discard the idea of automating projects. However, these days are long gone. 

With lower costs and easier assembly, today, developing a new project without home automation seems somewhat absurd. Below, with the help of AVE Chile , we've compiled a series of tips to help you incorporate domotics into your next project.

1. Experiencing home automation is key to understanding its value

The vast majority of people who have ever inhabited an automated space will hardly feel comfortable returning to traditional systems. To convince a new client, it's key that they can experience in situ the benefits of home automation: test the different options of a control panel, manage the environmental conditions of a space, change the intensity and color of the light, adjust the temperature, and/or interact with the different types of switches and their sensors .

2. The user must identify what they really want to control

Once the user experiences home automation, they may want to control everything, without much reason. By definition, home automation seeks to be globally intelligent, so it must function as a system that facilitates processes, without unnecessarily complicating the user's life . Automating the operation of an iron or a coffee machine, for example, may not make a real difference in the user's quality of life. However, the ability to program lights, alarms and/or heating at certain times of the day, will.

3. It's more effective to apply home automation to 'generate integrated solutions,' than to fulfill individual functions

Once the needs of the user have been identified, it's advisable to plan integrated solutions that allow programming and controlling of environments . For example, when selecting a predefined environment for the night, the system will execute, in a single process, the attenuation and shutdown of lights, the closing of curtains, and the activation of the alarm. This doesn't prevent the management of each option separately, but it's easier and more effective to consider them, from the outset, as responses as a whole.

4. There is no difference between a traditional electrical plan and a domotics plan

When bringing home automation into a built project, the architect must simply define the locations of the switches and other devices, and the specific functions of each one of them. With this plan, the company in charge of the installation of the automation system is responsible for intervening the electrical installation on site, giving the specialist the instruction to incorporate the wiring required by the home automation . This UTP ( Unshielded Twisted Pair ) cabling is much simpler than the one traditionally used, and occupies a single pipeline.

It's important to point out that home automation must be included in the construction plan before beginning the heavy work since in more advanced stages the complete process becomes more complex.

5. In just a couple of hours, an electrical specialist can learn to install a home automation system

It's not necessary for the electrical specialist chosen by the architect or client to be an expert in home automation in order to install it. The training related to this process can be done in just a few hours.

6. Properly programmed, the home automation system greatly reduces the energy consumption of the building

In the case of hotels, home automation allows spaces and rooms that are not in use to be kept completely off, taking detailed control of the use that each guest gives to each room. For example, if a guest has the heating on in his room and opens a window, the thermal system will shut down to avoid energy waste. Even during the night, while the guest sleeps, the system can be programmed to reduce the temperature slightly, saving a large amount of energy without the user noticing.

In addition, in buildings that use three-phase systems , it's possible to determine a maximum monthly energy consumption, avoiding that the expense exceeds the predetermined limit at the end of the month. The control panel gives the user a complete detail of this consumption: daily, weekly, monthly or yearly.

7. Home automation can improve the quality of life for elderly or differently abled people

Through centralized control panels and motion sensors, home automation can greatly facilitate and support the way in which older adults or people with disabilities inhabit their daily spaces. Among other benefits, it is possible to program the lighting of lights at a certain time of the day, increasing its intensity with the passing of the hours, or turning on and off automatically when the person enters certain rooms . In addition, people with Parkinson's disease or other motor diseases can solve the handling of the switches without touching them.

8. Integrate alarms in the home automation system to control remote intrusions or dangers

Including the alarm in a home automation system avoids the need to connect to a central, notifying the user directly on his mobile phone and showing in detail which door or window has been intruded. If surveillance cameras have been included, it's possible to see in real time what is happening in the building.

In the case of other hazards, such as a gas or water leak, the system warns the user to close the passage of these elements, while a definitive solution to the problem is found.

Editor's Note:  This article was published originally on January 08, 2019.

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Smart Houses

The world of computer technology is continuously advancing each and every day. We look back at what we had 5 years ago and are amazed to see how far we have come in such a short time. To know what to expect in the upcoming years is impossible, for technology is at such a constant increase. Computer technology is a wonderful tool and can benefit many people if you are willing to accept it. One of the advancements on the rise is Smart Houses. A Smart House is a house that is controlled by computers with artificial intelligence.

Many people are choosing to turn their houses into smart ones in order to create a safer and more technological environment. Throughout my report, I will discuss some features that I would include in my own smart house, such as safety and convenience. I think the most common reason that my house will be a smart house is for safety purposes. Not only does it give a peace of mind to know that my house is protected at all times, but it gives protection in times of danger.

Brinks Home Security provides several packages which you can accustom to your price range and allows you to pick the package which is right for your home. The standardized system is controlled by a digital keypad, which allows you to type in a 3-digit number that enables the system. It also features three panic buttons that directly contact the police department, the fire department, and the hospital in one quick touch of a button. This package comes with 2 door and window sensors that set the alarm off if they are opened while the system is armed.

It also comes with a motion detector that detects heat and body movements. If any of these features are triggered, a siren will sound which makes your family and the intruder aware that the Brinks monitoring center are being notified. Some extra features are a glass break protector, smoke & heat detectors, and carbon monoxide detectors. The system also provides a keyless keyfob that allows you to enable or disable the system with a touch of a quick button. As you can see, the Brinks Home Security provides a thorough package of home safety features.

Not only is it reliable, but also gives a secure way to keep your house safely protected. Other systems, such as the FireCracker Kit from X10. com , provide you with an affordable and easy system. It allows you to control all the systems in your house based from your computer. You can make your coffeepot start brewing or your turning off your lamp simply by the click of a mouse. Control all the lights in your house with your PC or with a remote. One touch of a button and your lights will be on, your heater turned up, and your bath tub already starting to get filled. How much better can it get?

I would also have a Robo-dog in my Smart House. This is a robotic dog, which features a motion sensor that puts the dog into a barking frenzy when it is set off. This not only scares the intruder, but it also notifies me that there is something wrong. The Robo-dog provides the benefits of a good guard dog without the inconvenience of attending to a pet. It would be placed near the door so if an intruder breaks in, then my guard dog will stop him in his tracks. There are many simple and affordable ways to keep your house, and mine, secure. Another common reason for a Smart House is convenience.

Imagine being able to control the temperature of your house or turning on your lights with one simple phone call. X10 provides just that . The touch-tone controller activates lights, reboots PCs and sets air for heating or air conditioning with a quick touch of a button. I can access this via any touch-tone phone or from the manual control keypad placed in my house. This gives the convenience of coming home to a warm, well-light house without having to go through the hassle of putting wood in the wood-stove or waiting for the heater to heat up the house.

A number of software programs are available that are needed to run a smart house. One of the programs suggested by the Home Automation Forum is the HomeSeer . This is a software program that allows you to run all of your computer-automated systemssuch as the touch-tone keypad. It has speech recognition and synthesis that allows you to control your programs simply by the sound of your voice. You simply need to program words into the system, such as bathroom light on and as soon as it recognizes your words, it turns the bathroom light on.

It also allows variations, so if you said bathroom on it would also perform the same task. It also has an email alert program. If something is irregular in your house, it will notify you via email as soon as it notices the problem. This will give you the security in knowing your house is protected and watched at all times. The inventor of HomeSeer, Rich Helmke, is currently working on a new program that is a tapi phone interface. This will give you all the control you want, as described by the Home Automation Forum.

A variety of free downloads of HomeSeer for trial offers are available at http://keware. com/download. htm#hscm11. As you can see, the possibilities for a Smart Houses are endless. Home automation is on a rise and soon we will no longer have to worry about those tedious tasks that are so time consuming in our daily lives. Cooking & cleaning wont even be a concern anymore, for your smart house will provide you with the living environment you desire. Consider making your house a smart house and provide your family with the security and convenience that they deserve.

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How is technology changing the homes we live in? How can hi-tech homes help old people to live independently? Read the article to find out about research and development into smarthomes in the UK.

Instructions

Do the preparation task first to help you with the difficult vocabulary. Then read the article and do the exercises to check your understanding. 

Preparation

People taking care of the elderly or sick at home may get help from the house itself.

Big changes

The beginning of the 21st century saw a revolution in home-living with new technology changing the places where we live, from the wireless internet to TV screens that hang on walls, and it seems technology could be changing our homes again. A project conducted by Johann Siau, Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire’s School of Engineering and Technology, builds on the University’s InterHome project  –  aiming to create a home that monitors people living at home who are frail or elderly.

The InterHome

‘We’ve developed a wrist-band type device,’ says Johann Siau, ‘which allows us to monitor the condition of an elderly person, or whoever is wearing the device. It allows us to collect data of a person, to detect if the person has fallen or is away from where they are supposed to be. It connects an elderly person with an assisted-living type device with the InterHome.’ The assisted-living project is part of the University’s wider InterHome project, which is the development of a smart house. The house stores the usage patterns of the person living there and can adapt to make it as energy efficient as possible. ‘Linking the two together, and building the service element, allows us to introduce the assisted-living idea to care for the elderly. It’s very important that these technologies are there to help and support rather than to replace any of the existing services.’

Built from zero

The InterHome is not just a prototype (a doll’s house at the moment) or a vehicle for research, it’s a study tool where students from a range of scientific disciplines get to learn and develop technology. The InterHome incorporates the latest broadband technology, mobile data and communication. Researchers and students make sure all the technology works together. ‘We’ve used this to teach our undergraduate students, as well as our postgraduate students, and gives us the flexibility to be able to design our systems because the hardware and software is developed in-house.’ It requires a variety of skills from students – electronic engineers, embedded-system engineers, computer students, design students. ‘The current plan we are working on is a smart home project in Watford with some commercial companies,’ says Johann Siau. ‘We are looking at how a smarter home can provide extra value services.’

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How smart homes have changed architecture guide

How smart homes have changed architecture advice, Modern house guide, Online property help tips

How Smart Homes Have Changed Architecture

9 October 2021

Do you dream of turning your house into a digital home where all the systems will work in unison and can be controlled remotely using your smartphone! If you have an affirmative response, then you have come to the right place.

How Smart Homes Have Changed Design

Today we are going to discuss how the trend of smart homes has been imparting a facelift to the architecture industry:

• Most modern-day homes rely on cables and cords. This makes it imperative for a designer to take the wiring into account while coming up with home renovation ideas. Doing this often limits their potential. The wireless capabilities of a smart home architecture can change all of that so that architects can enjoy greater freedom in their work.
• Lighting has a big role to play in affecting our moods and concentration levels. Warm lighting induces a relaxed feel whereas blue light boosts up our energy meter during the daytime so that we can focus more on our tasks. The pre-set schedules are followed by smart lighting for ensuring the right atmosphere before you set foot inside your house.
• The ambiance of our home is improved to a great extent by natural light entering our space at the right time. This is where the pre-set modes of smart curtains come into play so that we can wake up to the gentle sun rays caressing our faces at daybreak. It can also help in the creation of a secluded sleeping atmosphere at night.

These curtains can add to the safety quotient of your homes by randomly opening and closing even when the house is empty so that outsiders can’t comprehend if you are out on a vacation. Your energy bills will reduce drastically as the smart curtains help maintain your desired temperature by keeping the heat in or out. Geolocation data from your phone alerts the system whenever you leave home so that curtains can insulate during winter and keep heat out during summer.

• Music never fails to create the right atmosphere whether you are cooking in the kitchen or working in the garage. The process of integrating audio systems in your existing home architecture can be a challenging drill. Custom-designed or nearly invisible speakers can solve this issue by matching your house ambiance and offering utmost flexibility whether you wish to listen to music in a particular or all the rooms of your house. Smart audio systems make it possible to play the same audio simultaneously in all rooms or different tracks for different rooms.
• We rarely enjoy doing household chores. Smart appliances can make this process easier by taking care of all the house chores quickly and efficiently. A simple tap of a button is all it takes to remotely vacuum your living room, cook a pot roast and even make coffee. You can take the example of Samsung refrigerators which bank on built-in cameras to remotely view the contents inside the fridge for easy shopping.

A smart home comprises multiple devices which remain connected with the internet through your broadband – https://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/broadband/cheap-deals . This acts as a medium of accessing the devices either through remote or voice control. Herein lies the importance of choosing a proper broadband connection that can render adequate support to your home devices without succumbing to network issues.

It is also important to get a heavy-duty smartphone that can exercise remote control over your devices. The smartphone market is filled with phone deals and you can take your pick among the various options after considering your specific requirements. Since the internet has a big role to play in determining the efficacy of your smart home, you can choose amongst sim-only  deals with superb data capacity so that you can control your home appliances directly using your smartphone. All the architectural trends listed above can impart a facelift to your home design and help transition into a smart home.

Comments on this guide to how smart homes have changed architecture article are welcome.

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IELTS essay paragraph about a smart house

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The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20500

A Proclamation on Black Maternal Health Week,   2024

During Black Maternal Health Week, we recommit to ending the maternal health crisis that is taking the lives of far too many of our Nation’s mothers.

Women in America are dying at a higher rate from pregnancy-related causes than women in any other developed nation.  Black women face even more risk and are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.  That is in no small part because of a long history of systemic racism and bias.  Studies show that when Black women suffer from severe injuries or pregnancy complications or simply ask for assistance, they are often dismissed or ignored in the health care settings that are supposed to care for them.  People of color — including expecting mothers — also bear the brunt of environmental injustices like air and water pollution, which worsen health outcomes.  Too often, Black mothers lack access to safe and secure housing, affordable transportation, and affordable, healthy food.  This is unjust and unacceptable.

That is why my Administration has worked to address this crisis from the very beginning.  Vice President Kamala Harris came into office as a key leader on maternal health and continues to fight for improved maternal health outcomes, elevating the issue nationally and convening experts and activists to find solutions.  My Administration’s first piece of historic legislation — the American Rescue Plan — gave States the option to provide a full year of postpartum coverage to women on Medicaid, increasing it from just 60 days previously.  Now, 45 States, Washington, D.C., and the United States Virgin Islands provide a full year of this critical care.  We also made coverage under the Affordable Care Act more affordable, saving millions of families an average of $800 per year on health insurance premiums.

My Administration also released the Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis, which outlines actions the Federal Government will take to combat maternal mortality and improve maternal health.  To start, we created a new “Birthing-Friendly” hospital designation that highlights hospitals and health systems that offer high-quality maternal care — ensuring that expecting mothers know where to go to get the help they need.  To find out which facilities are “Birthing-Friendly,” go to medicare.gov/care-compare/. 

Mental health care is health care — it is so important that women have access to it throughout pregnancy and beyond.  My Administration launched the Maternal Mental Health Hotline so that the one in five women in America who experience maternal mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, or substance use disorder can get the support they need.  New and expecting mothers can call 1-833-TLC-MAMA — a confidential, 24-hour, toll-free number — to connect with professional counselors.  Tens of thousands of women have already taken advantage of this valuable hotline, and we know that being able to access support in times of need literally saves lives.  Additionally, we are supporting and expanding maternal mental health screening programs, including for postpartum depression.  We are partnering with community-based organizations to help pregnant women access services that treat substance use disorder and support victims of domestic violence.

My Administration is working to grow and diversify the maternal health workforce to better serve expecting mothers by helping health care providers hire and train physicians, certified midwives, doulas, and community health workers.  I also signed legislation to ensure employers make reasonable accommodations for pregnant and nursing mothers, who deserve job security and to have their workplace rights respected by expanding the use of break time and access to private spaces for millions of nursing parents.  I also remain committed to addressing the long-standing inequities that Black communities have faced and that continue to damage the health and wellness of Black mothers.  For example, we have been working to end discrimination in housing, make public transit more accessible to everyone no matter where they live, expand access to healthy and affordable food, and tackle dangerous environmental injustices that take the biggest toll on families from communities of color.

There is still so much to do to ensure safety and dignity in pregnancy and childbirth.  This week, we extend our gratitude to all the maternal health care workers, who are on the frontlines of this work.  Together, I know that we can make America the best country in the world to have a baby.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 11 through April 17, 2024, as Black Maternal Health Week.  I call upon all Americans to raise awareness of the state of Black maternal health in the United States by understanding the consequences of institutional racism; recognizing the scope of this problem and the need for urgent solutions; amplifying the voices and experiences of Black women, families, and communities; and committing to building a world in which Black women do not have to fear for their safety, well-being, dignity, or lives before, during, and after pregnancy.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this tenth day of April, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-eighth.

                             JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

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Smart Houses

The world of computer technology is continuously advancing each and every day. We look back at what we had 5 years ago and are amazed to see how far we have come in such a short time. To know what to expect in the upcoming years is impossible, for technology is at such a constant increase. Computer technology is a wonderful tool and can benefit many people if you are willing to accept it. One of the advancements on the rise is Smart Houses. A Smart House is a house that is controlled by computers with artificial intelligence.

Many people are choosing to turn their houses into smart ones in order to create a safer and more technological environment. Throughout my report, I will discuss some features that I would include in my own smart house, such as safety and convenience. I think the most common reason that my house will be a smart house is for safety purposes. Not only does it give a peace of mind to know that my house is protected at all times, but it gives protection in times of danger.

Brinks Home Security provides several packages which you can accustom to your price range and allows you to pick the package which is right for your home. The standardized system is controlled by a digital keypad, which allows you to type in a 3-digit number that enables the system. It also features three panic buttons that directly contact the police department, the fire department, and the hospital in one quick touch of a button. This package comes with 2 door and window sensors that set the alarm off if they are opened while the system is armed.

It also comes with a motion detector that detects heat and body movements. If any of these features are triggered, a siren will sound which makes your family and the intruder aware that the Brinks monitoring center are being notified. Some extra features are a glass break protector, smoke & heat detectors, and carbon monoxide detectors. The system also provides a keyless keyfob that allows you to enable or disable the system with a touch of a quick button. As you can see, the Brinks Home Security provides a thorough package of home safety features.

Not only is it reliable, but also gives a secure way to keep your house safely protected. Other systems, such as the FireCracker Kit from X10. com , provide you with an affordable and easy system. It allows you to control all the systems in your house based from your computer. You can make your coffeepot start brewing or your turning off your lamp simply by the click of a mouse. Control all the lights in your house with your PC or with a remote. One touch of a button and your lights will be on, your heater turned up, and your bath tub already starting to get filled. How much better can it get?

I would also have a Robo-dog in my Smart House. This is a robotic dog, which features a motion sensor that puts the dog into a barking frenzy when it is set off. This not only scares the intruder, but it also notifies me that there is something wrong. The Robo-dog provides the benefits of a good guard dog without the inconvenience of attending to a pet. It would be placed near the door so if an intruder breaks in, then my guard dog will stop him in his tracks. There are many simple and affordable ways to keep your house, and mine, secure. Another common reason for a Smart House is convenience.

Imagine being able to control the temperature of your house or turning on your lights with one simple phone call. X10 provides just that . The touch-tone controller activates lights, reboots PCs and sets air for heating or air conditioning with a quick touch of a button. I can access this via any touch-tone phone or from the manual control keypad placed in my house. This gives the convenience of coming home to a warm, well-light house without having to go through the hassle of putting wood in the wood-stove or waiting for the heater to heat up the house.

A number of software programs are available that are needed to run a smart house. One of the programs suggested by the Home Automation Forum is the HomeSeer . This is a software program that allows you to run all of your computer-automated systemssuch as the touch-tone keypad. It has speech recognition and synthesis that allows you to control your programs simply by the sound of your voice. You simply need to program words into the system, such as bathroom light on and as soon as it recognizes your words, it turns the bathroom light on.

It also allows variations, so if you said bathroom on it would also perform the same task. It also has an email alert program. If something is irregular in your house, it will notify you via email as soon as it notices the problem. This will give you the security in knowing your house is protected and watched at all times. The inventor of HomeSeer, Rich Helmke, is currently working on a new program that is a tapi phone interface. This will give you all the control you want, as described by the Home Automation Forum.

A variety of free downloads of HomeSeer for trial offers are available at http://keware. com/download. htm#hscm11. As you can see, the possibilities for a Smart Houses are endless. Home automation is on a rise and soon we will no longer have to worry about those tedious tasks that are so time consuming in our daily lives. Cooking & cleaning wont even be a concern anymore, for your smart house will provide you with the living environment you desire. Consider making your house a smart house and provide your family with the security and convenience that they deserve.

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Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Can't Stop Buying the 1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Billionaires Have Been Eager to Sell

April 22, 2024 — 05:06 am EDT

Written by Sean Williams for The Motley Fool  ->

Since the advent of the internet roughly three decades ago, more than a dozen next-big-thing investment trends and innovations have vied for Wall Street's attention. However, none of these innovations have inspired investors quite like the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.

When discussing "AI," I'm talking about the broad definition of utilizing software and systems to oversee tasks that would normally be assigned to humans. What makes AI such a potential game-changer for corporate America is machine learning , which allows these systems to evolve over time, without human intervention, to become more effective at their assigned tasks, and/or learn new tasks.

It's very easy to be inspired by AI from an investment standpoint when analysts are casually tossing out the "t" word (trillions) to describe its potential. According to a 2023 report from PwC, artificial intelligence can provide a $15.7 trillion lift to the global economy by the turn of the decade.

Seemingly every investor wants exposure to the rise of AI -- and this includes members of Congress .

Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders meeting with then-President Donald Trump. Image source: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead.

Nancy Pelosi is piling into the "infrastructure backbone" of the AI movement

Thanks to the STOCK Act, which was passed in 2012, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are required to report their trades of $1,000 or more no later than 45 days after they're completed. These periodic trading reports show that Democrats, on average, outperformed their Republican colleagues in the return column last year (31.18% vs. 17.99%).

The key to this outperformance was technology stocks, which were disproportionately owned by Democrats in the House and Senate.

However, Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has proven that she's no ordinary Democrat when it comes to beating the benchmark S&P 500 . Whereas the S&P 500 gained more than 24% last year, the "Congressional Trading 2023" report from Unusual Whales estimates that Nancy Pelosi's portfolio increased by more than 65%. Beating the broader market has become something of the norm for Pelosi.

Although the former House Speaker and her venture capitalist husband Paul Pelosi have primarily invested in industry-leading, megacap businesses, it's multiple timely investments in the infrastructure backbone of the AI movement, semiconductor behemoth Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) , which have fueled this outperformance.

While there's been some modest profit-taking along the way, Pelosi's periodic transaction reports, via Capitol Trades, shows:

• A call option purchase of $250,000 to $500,000 of Nvidia stock on July 23, 2021.
• A common stock purchase of $500,000 to $1 million of Nvidia stock on July 23, 2021.
• A common stock purchase of $1 million to $5 million of Nvidia stock on July 26, 2022.
• The purchase of $1 million to $5 million of Nvidia $120 strike call options on Nov. 22, 2023.

The most recent options trade has been particularly fruitful for Pelosi, with the value of these contracts increasing by almost $2 million in less than five months.

Nvidia's growth trajectory is unlike anything we've ever witnessed from a megacap company

Nvidia's ascension from a $360 billion company at the start of 2023 to the third-largest publicly traded company, with a market cap of almost $2.2 trillion , as of April 16, is the result of its graphics processing units (GPUs) taking the world by storm.

Though estimates vary, Nvidia's A100 and H100 GPUs are expected to account for approximately 90% of the GPUs deployed in AI-accelerated data centers this year. Nvidia's infrastructure is the "brains" that are helping to train large language models and oversee generative AI solutions.

On top of its monopoly like market share in high-compute data centers, Nvidia has attracted orders from virtually all of the most-influential tech companies on Wall Street. "Magnificent Seven" members Microsoft , Meta Platforms , Amazon , and Alphabet account for around 40% of its net sales. Meta alone is spending in the neighborhood of $10 billion to order 350,000 H100 GPUs for its data centers.

Soaring demand has been especially beneficial to Nvidia's pricing power. The law of supply and demand states that if the supply of an in-demand good or service is limited, the price for that good or service will rise until demand tapers. In fiscal 2024 (ended Jan. 28, 2024), Nvidia's data center sales climbed 217% , all while its cost of revenue rose (across all segments) by a more modest 43%. This makes it clear that the bulk of Nvidia's data center sales growth came from its otherworldly pricing power.

After recording roughly $27 billion in full-year sales in fiscal 2023, Nvidia more than doubled its revenue to almost $61 billion last year. If Wall Street's consensus estimates are anywhere in the ballpark, Nvidia is expected to deliver $110 billion in sales this year and close to $138 billion in fiscal 2026.

We've simply never witnessed a company as large as Nvidia sustain this level of growth.

Image source: Getty Images.

Nvidia has eight prominent billionaire investors running for the exit

While it's clear the former House Speaker and her husband like what they see from Nvidia, more than a half-dozen prominent billionaire investors can't sell shares of the company fast enough. Form 13F filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the December-ended quarter show that eight highly successful billionaires sold shares , including (total shares sold in parenthesis):

• Israel Englander of Millennium Management (1,689,322 shares)
• Jeff Yass of Susquehanna International (1,170,611 shares)
• Steven Cohen of Point72 Asset Management (1,088,821 shares)
• David Tepper of Appaloosa Management (235,000 shares)
• Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management (218,839 shares)
• Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management (142,900 shares)
• John Overdeck and David Siegel of Two Sigma Investments (30,663 shares)

One probable reason for these eight billionaires to go against the grain is history. Every next-big-thing investment trend for three decades, including the internet, has worked its way through an early innings bubble . Regardless of the innovation, investors have a terrible habit of overestimating the adoption and uptake of new technologies. If history rhymes, once again, the AI bubble is going to burst. No company has benefited more directly from the AI revolution than Nvidia. Thus, it may have the most to lose if the bubble pops.

A strong argument can also be made that Nvidia is its own worst enemy . Nvidia increasing production of its AI-GPUs, coupled with the entrance of Advanced Micro Devices and Intel with high-powered GPUs of their own, could quickly reduce the scarcity that drove AI-GPU prices into the stratosphere. In short, Nvidia's pricing power and gross margin should decline.

Perhaps the biggest worry for Nvidia , and the reason eight billionaires reduced their fund's respective stakes during the fourth quarter, is that the company's top-four customers are all developing in-house GPUs for their data centers. This internal innovation is almost certain to result in reduced future orders from Nvidia.

Despite Nancy Pelosi's phenomenal track record of outpacing the S&P 500, both the actions of these eight billionaires, along with historic precedence, suggest Nvidia stock may be in a bubble.

Should you invest $1,000 in Nvidia right now?

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Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Sean Williams has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, Intel, and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Intel and recommends the following options: long January 2025 $45 calls on Intel, long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft, and short May 2024 $47 calls on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy .

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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Hundreds of Jan. 6 Prosecutions—Including Donald Trump’s—Are Suddenly in Peril at the Supreme Court

Will the Supreme Court jeopardize the prosecution of more than 350 defendants involved with Jan. 6, including Donald Trump, by gutting the federal statute that prohibits their unlawful conduct? Maybe so. Tuesday’s oral arguments in Fischer v. United States were rough sledding for the government, as the conservative justices lined up to thwap Joe Biden’s Department of Justice for allegedly overreaching in its pursuit of Jan. 6 convictions. Six members of the court took turns wringing their hands over the application of a criminal obstruction law to the rioters, fretting that they faced overly harsh penalties for participating in the violent attack. Unmentioned but lurking in the background was Trump himself, who can wriggle out of two major charges against him with a favorable decision in this case.

There are, no doubt, too many criminal laws whose vague wording gives prosecutors near-limitless leeway to threaten citizens with decades in prison. But this isn’t one of them. Congress wrote a perfectly legible law and the overwhelming majority of judges have had no trouble applying it. It would be all too telling if the Supreme Court decides to pretend the statute is somehow too sweeping or jumbled to use as a tool of accountability for Jan. 6.

Start with the obstruction law itself, known as Section 1552(c), which Congress enacted to close loopholes that Enron exploited to impede probes into its misconduct . The provision is remarkably straightforward—a far cry from the ambiguous, sloppy, or muddled laws that typically flummox the judiciary. It’s a mainstay of the Department of Justice’s “Capitol siege” prosecutions, deployed in about a quarter of all cases. Overall, 350 people face charges under this statute, Trump among them , and the DOJ has used it to secure the convictions of about 150 rioters . It targets anyone who “corruptly … obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” And it clarifies that an official proceeding includes “a proceeding before the Congress.”

The government argues that some rioters attempted to “obstruct” an “official proceeding” by halting the count of electoral votes through “corrupt” means. That includes Joseph Fischer, the defendant in the current case. Fischer, who served as a police officer before Jan. 6, allegedly texted that the protest “might get violent”; that “they should storm the capital and drag all the democrates [sic] into the street and have a mob trial”; and that protesters should “take democratic congress to the gallows,” because they “can’t vote if they can’t breathe..lol.” Video evidence shows Fischer assaulting multiple police officers on the afternoon of Jan. 6 after breaching the Capitol.

Would anyone seriously argue that this person did not attempt to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding? For a time, it seemed not: 14 of the 15 federal judges—all but Judge Carl Nichols in this case—considering the charge in various Jan. 6 cases agreed that it applied to violent rioters bent on stopping the electoral count. So did every judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit except one, Judge Gregory Katsas. Both Nichols and Katsas were appointed by Trump. Their crusade to kneecap the law caught SCOTUS’ attention, and the court decided to intervene despite overwhelming consensus among lower court judges. The Supreme Court’s decision will have major implications for Trump: Two of the four charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith in the former president’s Jan. 6 prosecution revolve around this offense. A ruling that eviscerates the obstruction law would arguably cut out the heart of the indictment.

At least three justices seem ready to do just that. Justice Clarence Thomas—back on the bench after yesterday’s unexplained absence —grilled Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar over the law’s application to Jan. 6. “There have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings. Has the government applied this provision to other protests in the past?” Thomas asked, as if to nail the Justice Department for inconsistency and reveal some improper motive for wielding the law against violent insurrectionists. Justice Neil Gorsuch trolled Prelogar by alluding to Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s infamous fire alarm incident . “Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?” he asked. Justice Samuel Alito joined in to ask about “protests in the courtroom” when an audience member interrupts the justices and “delays the proceeding for five minutes.”

“For all the protests that have occurred in this court,” Alito noted pointedly, “the Justice Department has not charged any serious offenses, and I don’t think any one of those protestors has been sentenced to even one day in prison.” Why, he wondered, weren’t they charged under the obstruction statute?

Alito, audibly angry, continued: “Yesterday protestors blocked the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and disrupted traffic in San Francisco,” he told Prelogar. “What if something similar to that happened all around the Capitol so … all the bridges from Virginia were blocked, and members from Virginia who needed to appear at a hearing couldn’t get there or were delayed in getting there? Would that be a violation of this provision?”

To be clear, this is trolling: There is simply no comparison between a violent attack on the Capitol and protests that take the form of civil disobedience. And these justices expressed no similar concern about an ongoing red-state effort to persecute peaceful protesters who participate in Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Gorsuch and Alito’s hypotheticals ignore the reality that there are two layers of protection between minor protests and this rather major law. First, the Constitution affords prosecutorial discretion to the executive branch, allowing the Department of Justice to decide when an illegal “protest” is dangerous enough to warrant the use of a criminal law like the obstruction statute. Second, prosecutors must always prove the alleged offense to a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, creating a democratic check on the abusive use of a stringent law to punish a silly crime.

Prelogar highlighted this latter point, explaining that juries have indeed acquitted Jan. 6 defendants of obstruction. If prosecutors ever apply this (or any other) criminal statute to a questionable set of facts, they may always be thwarted by a jury. That is how the system is meant to work.

This kind of behavior from Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito is no surprise at this point. And the liberal justices countered them as best they could. What’s troubling is that the other conservative justices jumped in to join the pile-on. Chief Justice John Roberts insistently pressed Prelogar to prove that the Justice Department has interpreted and enforced the obstruction law consistently in the past. This question ignored the fact that, as Prelogar reminded the court, there has never been any crime like the assault on the Capitol , so the agency had no prior opportunity to apply the law in any similar way.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the Justice Department didn’t really need this statute because it has other laws at its disposal. “There are six other counts in the indictment here,” he told Prelogar. Why “aren’t those six counts good enough just from the Justice Department’s perspective given that they don’t have any of the hurdles?” Of course, the DOJ brought the obstruction charge specifically because it was more serious than the others; prosecutors felt an obligation to enforce Congress’ strong protections against intrusions on official proceedings, including those in the Capitol. Kavanaugh appears to think the DOJ should have settled for a smattering of lesser charges. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was not so obtuse; she earnestly worried that the statute was too broad and fished around for narrowing constructions. Yet she seemed unsatisfied with the many options Prelogar provided to keep the law limited to the most egregious interruptions of government business.

What all six justices seemed tempted to do was rip up Section 1552(c) because it happens to include another sentence that applies to the destruction of evidence and other official documents. Jan. 6 rioters didn’t destroy evidence, this argument goes, so they can’t be culpable under a law. That reading is untenable , something Prelogar impressively reinforced at every turn on Tuesday, but it may be attractive if a majority wants to defuse this statute before it’s used against Trump in a court of law.

Smith’s indictment of the former president for his participation in Jan. 6 doesn’t entirely hinge on obstruction. It does, however, weave obstruction into both the facts and the legal theory of the case, placing it at the center of a broader criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. If SCOTUS defuses the law now, Smith would have to scrap two of four charges and restructure the entire indictment, making it that much easier for Trump to demand further delay and, eventually, evade a conviction.

The justices know this. They should have been on their best behavior on Tuesday to avoid any glimmer of impropriety. It was already profoundly disturbing that Thomas sat on the case given his wife’s involvement with the attempt to overturn the election. The other justices’ faux concern about overcriminalization of protesters only added to the foul smell emanating from arguments. There’s no telling how Fischer will turn out; maybe the liberal justices will help their colleagues rediscover their better angels behind the scenes. From Tuesday’s vantage point, though, the argument was a bleak reminder of how easy it is for cloistered jurists to wish away the massive stakes of a case like this.

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Guest Essay

A Planetary Crisis Awaits the Next President

By Stephen Markley

Mr. Markley is a novelist.

In the 12 years it took me to write “The Deluge,” my novel of the climate crisis, I watched as chaotic weather, record temperatures and shocking political events outpaced my imagination. The book depicts the human tipping point, when the damage becomes irreversible and the foundations of our economy, our politics and our world begin to crack. The plot points I was concocting in 2010 would become a constant drumbeat of headlines into 2024.

Last year alone, the warning signs included soaring ocean temperatures, a record loss of Antarctic Sea ice and the highest global average temperature in recorded human history. Wildfires, droughts, floods and extreme weather of every variety have come to shock even the scientists who study the shocking stuff. This is not the history we want to be living through.

Yet here we are, and those gears of history will grind together again this year as another presidential election meets our permanent emergency. The stakes of the climate crisis render the cliché of “This is the most important election of our lifetimes” increasingly true because every four years those stakes climb precipitously alongside the toppling records of a radically new climatic regime.

The White House may soon be recaptured by Donald Trump, who called the climate crisis a “hoax” and even when backing off that assertion insisted , “I don’t know that it’s man-made.” He has demonstrated his thinking again and again, as when he told a scientist , “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch.”

There has recently been a great deal of reporting on Project 2025 , a 900-plus-page road map for a second Trump administration assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation. On climate, the report is succinct: “The Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”

The report recommends a repeal of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which would shred the tax credits that have led to hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in clean energy, the jump-starting of factory openings and the creation of jobs in virtually every corner of the country. Also lost will be investments in environmental justice, those measures that aim to reduce pollution in marginalized communities, provide affordable clean energy and create jobs in low-income neighborhoods. As for electric cars, which are critical to meeting the nation’s climate goals, the report recommends an end to all federal mandates and subsidies.

A second Trump administration would most likely grant permits for fossil fuel drilling and pipelines basically anywhere it has the say-so, scrap the methane fee on oil and gas producers and dismantle new pollution limits on cars, trucks and power plants. It would almost certainly revoke California’s waiver to approve higher standards under the Clean Air Act, seek repeal of the Antiquities Act used to protect endangered landscapes and attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act.

But perhaps most ominously, a Trump presidency would impede Americans’ ability to find out what’s being done to them. Project 2025 proposes dismantling and privatizing parts of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency that studies and monitors the climate, and using an executive order to “reshape” the Global Change Research Program, apparently to muddy its assessments of the pace of climate change and the potential impact. We would walk into this new dark era with a blindfold on.

Mr. Trump is at heart a billionaire doing favors for other billionaires by cutting their taxes and eliminating or not enforcing rules that protect the rest of us from asthma and cancer. During his four years in office, he managed to dismantle or degrade over 100 environmental rules, which brought real-world death and suffering. The medical journal The Lancet estimated that in the year 2019 alone these policies led to 22,000 excess deaths from heart disease, asthma and lung cancer, among other causes.

For all the damage that was done, Mr. Trump and his administration fortunately proved incompetent at making the government fulfill his intentions. We shouldn’t delude ourselves with thinking that he and his allies will be caught as flatfooted as they were by their surprise victory in 2016. What Project 2025 demonstrates is that an enormous amount of thinking has gone in to how to destroy the government’s capacity to enforce environmental protections, conduct research or even assess the scientific reality of our situation. Of course, the worst-case scenario, a full or partial repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, will depend on the composition of Congress.

My advice is to not tell yourself comforting bedtime stories about the political resiliency of that law when so many of its benefits lie in the years ahead.

One can hold up a document like Project 2025 and shout from the rooftops just how extreme it is. One can attempt to use numbers to describe this danger. But everyone will fall short — and, surely, I’ve fallen short — in describing just how frightening a second Trump presidency could actually be.

Do not limit your imagination.

Mr. Trump himself offered a glimpse in a recent meeting with oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago, where, The Washington Post reported, he said, “I hate wind.” He also told the executives that they should contribute to his campaign, that his policies would be much better for oil and gas than President Biden’s and that he’d do much of what they wanted “on Day 1.”

History will fork, and in a single day our window of opportunity for keeping the climate crisis from spiraling out of control could very well slam shut. Global emissions must peak this decade and begin a rapid decline for the world to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic warming. When I began writing my novel, we had something like 20 years to accomplish that task. After the election, we will have 62 months.

This makes the 2024 election a singular event in the climate crisis. Despite a number of headwinds, renewable energy capacity boomed last year, increasing 50 percent globally. According to the International Energy Agency, global renewable capacity is on course to be at two and a half times current levels by 2030, which means the world is edging closer to achieving a key climate target of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030. The risks of the crisis are growing rapidly, but so is our capacity to confront this challenge at the speed and scale necessary. We must accelerate that momentum at all costs.

The other major candidate in the race, President Biden, has been a steadfast proponent of that acceleration.

I fully admit, Mr. Biden was not my first, nor even my seventh, choice in the 2020 Democratic primary. Yet when it came to the immense challenge of confronting this crisis, I am forever grateful that he proved me wrong, delivering a game-changing victory with the narrowest of congressional margins. Even as much of the rest of Mr. Biden’s ambitious policy agenda got hacked away in Congress, one thing remained: re-industrialization through clean energy investment.

This led to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate legislation the country has ever seen and a more important achievement than the Paris climate accord. In just two years, that bill has galvanized clean energy investment in the United States and set a pace for the rest of the world to compete in the growing clean energy economy. These investments are expected to create more than nine million jobs over the next decade. That growth in clean energy is not only breaking records by the year but also by the quarter, with the end of 2023 seeing a 40 percent increase in investments in clean energy and transportation over the last quarter of 2022.

As those industries of decarbonization spread to every state and to many congressional districts, people’s lives and livelihoods increasingly will become intertwined and invested in clean energy. When a Texas congressman can’t survive an election in a solidly Republican district without the backing of the wind and solar industries, when a battery factory in Hardin County, Ky ., is employing 5,000 people, when the fossil fuel economy is falling to the zero-carbon infrastructure we demand, that will change a politician’s calculations. The increasing political and economic clout of those clean energy industries will challenge the fossil fuel status quo. We are at the beginning of an absolute revolution of the American economy that will send manufacturing soaring and pollution plummeting.

Any climate hawk could try to encumber my argument with caveats, unaddressed pet issues and whatabouts, but as far as our shared atmosphere is concerned, there are only three pieces of relevant information: who Joe Biden is, who Donald Trump is, and the urgency of the crisis before us. While it’s true the United States continues to produce record amounts of fossil gas and near-record amounts of oil, these numbers reflect the all-of-the-above energy policies of the past 15 years. The Inflation Reduction Act and several critical regulations from Mr. Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency will drive the decarbonization that should put us within striking distance of our Paris climate agreement target by 2030, something that seemed unfathomable four years ago.

It’s worth dissecting how we achieved such progress. This stunning victory was made possible only by Stacey Abrams’s tenacious work in Georgia to flip two U.S. Senate seats in 2020, giving Mr. Biden a Senate majority on top of a House majority (which he narrowly lost in 2022).

Work is also underway on the state and local levels. In the last four years, Democrats have led efforts in Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan and Washington to pass ambitious climate laws when voters demanded it. In major cities, we see aggressive action like Minneapolis’s Climate Equity Plan and Chicago’s push to end natural gas hookups for new construction.

From small cities like Athens, Ohio, which has a citywide carbon fee , to high school students campaigning for solar panels and electric buses, citizens can drive the movement to electrify everything and crush demand for fossil fuels. State public utility commissions remain ignored players with their hands on the controls of enormous amounts of carbon, ripe for campaigns to elect or appoint climate-oriented members. Whether we’re voting for president or state legislator or dogcatcher, we should vote for a dogcatcher who recognizes the imperative of the climate crisis.

The lesson being that the only thing that has worked, and must continue to work, is democracy at every level. None of us have the option to be cynical, to disdain electoral politics or to pretend we’re not making a distinct moral choice when voting for a third-party candidate or sitting out an election.

Right now, this means electing Democrats. The expiration of many of the Trump tax cuts in 2025 could create the leverage to push climate efforts even farther. We must look at this election and understand that it’s now or never — that we can create the opportunity for the United States to smash past its emission reduction goals and spur the rest of the world to follow. The climate movement can either fight like hell for Mr. Biden’s re-election or watch as Mr. Trump and his allies set fire to the planet.

Climate is not just another issue. I do not deny that we live in a complex and precarious world or that our consciences are torn by a web of domestic challenges and geopolitical upheavals. But we are in denial if we do not recognize that this is the crisis that will define this century, and if we fail, the entire human future. Our fossil fuel system is driving the planet to a set of conditions that humanity has never experienced, where even the imagination of novelists will fail us.

And yet the climate crisis is also the foundation on which we can build a more just, equitable and prosperous world. Every election is precious, every ballot we cast a moral record of what we did in this crucial historical moment. Do not sit on your hands, do not deny the stakes, do not waste that vote.

Stephen Markley is the author of “The Deluge” and “Ohio: A Novel.”

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