What is ECHONET?

Changes in the environment surrounding smart homes

After reaching a peak in FY2004, the energy consumption in Japan has been on a downward trend. This is due to economic growth while curbing energy consumption as Japanese energy consumption moves towards energy saving, particularly in the industry sector, and the development of energy saving products has become popular.
However, when looking at trends by sector for growth between FY1973 (at the time of the oil embargo) and FY2022, while the commercial and business sector remained at 0.9 times with the progress in energy saving mainly in the manufacturing industry, because of the 1.8 times increase in energy consumption in the household sector.
In response to the tight power supply and instability of energy prices, there is a renewed sense of the importance of energy conservation in the household sector and it is essential to improve the energy conservation of houses themselves.

Source: Agency for Natural Resources and Energy – Japan’s Energy White Paper 2024
(To be replaced with English version when available)

On the other hand, thanks to a policy established to promote the introduction of solar power generation, it has increased by an average of approximately 64 MW a month since 2013 and is forecast to reach approximately 140 GW by 2030. The result of this may cause that the generated power has exceeded demand from business offices and homes is flowing into the power distribution system and as this has caused a rise in voltage in the power distribution system, it has the potential to interrupt the high quality and stable provision of power. In order to prevent this, in addition to promoting technical development that would restrain the amount of power generated by solar power generation, there are calls for promoting the deployment of equipment that can store energy, such as electric vehicles, storage batteries and heat pump water heaters, thus “creating electricity”, “storing electricity” and “efficiently using electricity”.