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Energy·applied

Energy Management

Why it matters

People assume autonomy is bought with hardware: enough panels, enough battery, done. The truth is that the same components can deliver a resilient home or a fragile one depending entirely on the logic between them — when the heat pump runs, what charges first, which loads survive a shortage, what role the grid is permitted to play. Management is the invisible half of every energy system, and it is where autonomy is actually decided. A home that runs its heavy loads at solar noon needs a far smaller battery than one that ignores the sun's schedule. A building that knows which circuits matter can shrink a blackout from a crisis to a footnote. Hardware sets the possibilities. Management chooses among them, every hour, forever.

Role in 001's holistic picture

Management is the nervous system of the energy organism: it schedules the heat pump against the array's output, arbitrates between electric and thermal storage, and enforces the priorities that make building autonomy and blackout independence real. Its natural home is open automation — a building's brain should belong to its owner.

The open-source way

The owner-controlled logic this sense argues for already has a mature open template. Home Assistant is a local-first automation platform that runs on hardware the owner controls rather than a vendor's cloud. Its Energy dashboard tracks generation, storage, and consumption, and automates load-shifting. The priorities, the scheduling into generation hours, and the grid's permitted role are all decided by the building's owner rather than a distant server.

How 001 engages with it

House 001 runs the most opinionated management architecture we have: a topology where the grid cannot power the house at all. Grid electricity may only trickle into the battery through a small dedicated charger. The house's sole AC source is its own inverter. Autonomy is the house's permanent condition. A blackout merely makes it visible. The grid is demoted to a guest that occasionally tops up the reserve. The same philosophy shows in how surplus is spent: summer overproduction charges two electric vehicles, putting every kilowatt-hour to work instead of clipping it. For Unity Hub, the accepted design carries the two-circuit split (critical/non-critical) and occupancy-based zonal heating. The full control story — sensors, automation, the digital layer — is work in progress. We will publish it as it lands.

Maturity: applied. House 001's grid-as-guest topology and surplus-to-EV routing run daily. Unity Hub's management design is in progress on published foundations.

Further reading