Getting into the zone: how the internet of things can improve energy efficiency and demand response in a commercial building

Getting into the Zone: How the Internet of Things can Improve Energy Efficiency and Demand Response in a Commercial Building Peng Zhao, Electric Power Research Institute Therese Peffer, California Institute for Energy & Environment, UC Berkeley Ram Narayanamurthy, Electric Power Research Institute Gabe Fierro, Software Defined Buildings, UC Berkeley Paul Raftery, Soazig Kaam, Joyce Kim, Center for the Built Environment, UC Berkeley ABSTRACT While building automation and controls have long used data and analytics to improve building performance, the proliferation of connected devices and sensors adds a new dimension with greater insight to the end user’s impact on energy consumption. The application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in building systems allows connected devices to communicate and provide enhanced control functions. The increasingly improved visibility at the zonal/room level suggests several ways to improve both energy efficiency and demand response. UC Berkeley researchers have worked to interface wireless networks with existing building automation systems (BAS) as well as creating virtual BASs by interconnecting control and sensor hardware. The simple Monitoring and Actuation Profile (sMAP) delivers and labels data from various sources into a single compact database; the eXtensible Building Operating System (XBOS) provides the platform for applications to access this data. This paper describes a collaborative research project between Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and UC Berkeley that builds on this work by examining data from several sources: the BAS of a commercial building on campus, wireless indoor environmental sensors (temperature, light, humidity, motion, carbon dioxide), browser-based thermal comfort voting, a networked heated-and-cooled chair, and connected plugload sensors. We describe the results of testing the individual tools, and next steps. Background Overview of IoT in the Building Automation Industry IoT or “digitizing the physical world” is estimated to create value potentially between $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025. Most of the value will come from operation and optimization of buildings, public health and transportation, mainly from nine potential settings: human wearable devices, home, retail environments, offices, factories, worksites, vehicles, cities and places outside urban environments (Manyika 2015). In the building automation and controls industry, the technology development indicates a clear trend of convergence between building systems and IT (e.g., energy information analytics). In the last decade, more building system components such as cooling, heating and lighting systems are being connected either directly or through the building energy management system (BEMS), internally and externally. The number of sensors and controls, including wireless devices is increasing. In parallel, IT development suggests a trend from automated commissioning, energy information modeling with computer- aided tools, and automated demand response (DR) to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and IoT. We can see that building systems and devices are beginning to embed analytical software for Proceedings of ACEE Summer Study, 2016 www.escholarship.org/uc/item/5bm711zk