Patent ID: 8207865

Claim:
A method of remote metering of energy consumed and/or inputted by a plurality of energy consuming and/or inputting units of a power grid, wherein each unit comprises an energy consuming entity as well as at least one meter and/or a meter box connected with one or more meters, the method comprising: connecting the meter boxes and/or the meters with at least one backend platform via a communication network; electrically connecting the meters at one end with the power grid and at the other end with the energy consuming entities; and communicating between at least two of the group of meter boxes, meters and backend platforms by means of a generic bi-directional resource management protocol on top of an IP protocol stack via the communication network and thereby encoding and decoding data transferred via the resource management protocol according to a predefined extensible specification comprising a functional group for meter information and control; wherein the function group for meter information and control comprises a data element for connecting and disconnecting the unit from the power grid; wherein the extensible specification comprises a functional group for home automation; wherein the functional group for home automation comprises a data element for consumption detection and a data element for device control.