In a piece for GreenBiz in early January, Lauren Helper wrote that buildings wired for energy efficiency are no longer a novelty but more a matter of fact throughout many places in the world, the United States certainly.
Smart buildings, automated buildings and buildings optimized for energy savings have entered a mainstream level of awareness thanks in large part to this technology’s consumer counterpart, the Internet of Things.
But the technology’s proliferation doesn’t necessarily mean everyone understands it. Far from it. “The rush into energy management technology comes as companies, cities and ordinary people grapple with the potential implications of data gleaned from smart grids, which stands to generate energy cost savings of up to $2 trillion by 2030, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology,” Helper wrote.
This only describes the energy conservation aspect of building data, too. The sensors in automated buildings pick up much, much more information than energy consumption data. So do a building’s occupants.
So, what do we do with all this data?
Answers to that question emerge every day. Below are a few exciting examples.
Your Building Could Let You Know Whether It Was Designed For Its Current Usage
This almost sounds philosophical, like a dog trying to communicate that it wasn’t meant to bark. But, really, what’s happening within building data is a check, an affirmation or a refutation, of whether an architect’s or a designer’s plans translate to reality.
David Barista, Editor-in-Chief of Building Design+Construction, took a nice look at Big Data in late December to see how it affects planning and design. Building performance and occupant usage offer a lot of potential feedback about a building’s design, he wrote.
“Design teams are tapping into a host of data sources — from Twitter feeds to mobile surveys to security camera footage — to observe how people use and move through spaces. Often, they discover that design intent does not match reality.”
Your Building Could Analyze Your Gait and Let You Know When It Detects a Problem
Timo Elliott at ZDNet projected a few trends for Big Data in 2015, and one line struck us as almost unfathomably futuristic.
“Even simple data can lead to big insights,” Elliott wrote. “For example, sensor-equipped carpets promise to help seniors stay independent longer — not because the sensors themselves are complex, but because powerful pattern-detection algorithms can learn a resident’s normal gait and sound an alert if it starts to deteriorate.”
Elliott is referring here to a technology that debuted in the UK in 2012, a “magic carpet” that could have applications beyond gait analysis for seniors.
“The carpet can be retrofitted at low cost, to allow living space to adapt as the occupiers’ needs evolve — particularly relevant with an aging population and for those with long term disabilities,” University of Manchester senior lecturer in sensor implementation Dr. Patricia Scully said at the time.
Your Building Could Tell You Which Power Source Is Most Optimal and When It Is So
InformationWeek’s Jeff Bertolucci had a nice profile a few years ago on then-startup Stem, an energy storage company that offers businesses a hybrid battery-and-grid energy option that learns when to use which source.
“Stem’s predictive algorithms help companies determine the best times to pull power from the grid. It uses weather data, for instance, to develop a profile of changes in temperature, wind velocity, and humidity at any moment in time,” Bertolucci wrote.
“By studying a business’s energy load profile, as well as the energy prices charged by the local utility, Stem can switch to battery power when prices are at their peak.”
We say “then-startup” because Stem has grown quickly in the last two years. In fact, the company just raised $27 million at the beginning of this year.
Your Building’s Occupants Can Help Save Energy and Make its Environment More Comfortable
People in buildings process huge amounts of data on their own, whether it’s gauging how comfortable a room’s temperature is or whether insufficient sunlight is coming through the windows.
“Building occupants want meaningful personalization in their workspaces,” Building Robotics’ David Weidberg wrote in January at AutomatedBuildings.com. “The concept of changing temperature or lighting levels at work might seem trivial, but it is something we all control in other environments, including one’s home and car. For building managers, giving occupants this type of control has always been controversial due to energy concerns and the difficulty of managing different preferences among occupants.”
Academic research suggests those concerns might be unfounded.
It turns out that giving building occupants access to energy-consumption data, presenting it in a format that is meaningful to them and then turning over the controls to them can both allow the occupied spaces to respond immediately to comfort demands, and incentivize reduced energy consumption.
“Giving occupants understandable information about their energy consumption is a first step in helping them understand this problem, and their ability to change it,” University of Kansas researchers Casey Franklin and Jae Chang write.
The optimal monitoring hardware for occupants, however, depends on things such as cultures, social contexts and user desires, the researchers write. “The best design will be one that adapts to each user’s needs and should not be based on an empirical comparison of features.”
The researchers recommend that architects and designers should study occupant behavior and “energy cultures in buildings” — this, by the way, is in line with what Barista was talking about above — so that building occupants can get the information they need in the most relevant context for them.
Santosh K. Gupta, et. al, researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, also advocate incorporating occupant feedback [PDF] into building temperature control, and they propose a model “that is developed and analyzed using gradient optimization.”
“Existing approaches treat the building and its occupants as separate entities,” the researchers write. “Such a fragmented approach towards attaining energy efficiency in buildings will most likely be sub-optimal. An effective building energy control system must take into account the feedback of its occupants, and their individual comfort levels at the current temperature/heat input settings.
“This can be a very challenging task in large commercial buildings such as schools, libraries, offices etc. which have a very diverse collection of occupants with different ranges of preferred temperature. This calls for a control solution that does not rely on a priori knowledge of the comfortable temperature ranges/comfort functions of the individual occupants, but learns them through occupant feedback, and incorporates such feedback along with energy cost in controlling building temperature optimally.”
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