California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE)

Sensors for improving building performance are rapidly populating the market, driven in part by the drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions resulting from energy production as well as improve the interior environment for healthy and more productive spaces. UC Berkeley has led wireless sensor development over the past 25 years (e.g., Telos mote), with the Hamilton (named after Alexander Hamilton on the US $10 bill) as the most recent. The Hamilton sensor was designed as a low-cost high-performance sensor that is modular and interoperable. The objective of the Hamilton project was to create, evaluate and establish the technological foundations for secure and easy to deploy building energy efficiency applications utilizing pervasive, low-cost wireless sensors integrated with traditional Building Management Systems (BMS), consumer-sector building components, and powerful data analytics.

The project included iterative hardware design, incorporating a high-performance database (BTrDb, http://btrdb.io/), creating and iterating the development of secure data middleware (BOSSwave, WAVE/WAVEMQ), working with and pushing the development of an open-source tiny operating system RiotOS, and implementing and improving protocols such as Thread/OpenThread and TCP/IP. The hardware benefited from careful design to drive down the cost; the design included a System-on-a-Chip (SoC), chip antenna, single crystal and five passive components. Careful design of the operating system created a low-power design to enable a long life with small batteries. The hardware included several sensors: temperature, radiant temperature, relative humidity, magnetometer, accelerometer, and light, with an optional occupancy (Passive InfraRed) sensor. The project was the basis of several applications, both internal to the research team and other researchers and professionals at other institutions. Several applications used the sensor hardware as the basis for other complex devices. Other applications used the sensors to improve building performance through interoperating with the building Heating Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) system, such as using occupancy and/or distributed temperature sensing to reduce HVAC zone energy while still providing thermal comfort and to reduce peak loads in small commercial buildings. We demonstrated cloud-based energy analytics, implemented a schedule and a Model Predictive Controller in a small commercial building to optimize HVAC energy, occupancy and electricity price. Initial integration of these technological innovations was performed through the creation of execution containers containing the WAVE agent and various driver, proxy, or building system function logic.

The research added to the understanding of efficient sensor hardware, secure middleware, time-series data management (high performance database), efficient communication protocols, and interoperating with applications and building systems. The project showed the technical effectiveness and economic feasibility of creating a low-cost, modular, and easy-to-deploy sensor. Through conversations with multiple end users, the research team discovered that many customers wanted data management and services in addition to the sensors. HamiltonIOT developed packages of sensors, border router, and data services to provide a seamless “plug-and-play” sensor deployment. Some customers were willing to pay for higher quality sensors (such as light); some customers wanted a robust enclosure (waterproof).

This is the final report for the State Partnership for Energy Efficient Demonstrations (originally UC/CSU Energy Efficient Campuses) project (contract number 500-10-049), conducted by the California Institute for Energy and Environment. The information from this project contributes to PIER’s Buildings End-Use Efficiency Program.

From 2004 through 2014, the State Partnership for Energy Efficient Demonstrations (SPEED) accelerated the market adoption of energy-efficient technologies. This Public Interest Energy Research Buildings End-Use Efficiency Program supported effort included lighting technologies and heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) technologies.  This collaboration with industry, public entities, and utilities focuses on field research, beta testing, demonstrations, and activities facilitating technology deployed by California energy-efficiency programs. This report highlights technologies and projects, and summarizes and indexes technical reports, case studies, guide specifications, and other documents created by the program.

This report fully covers Program activities from March 2012 through July 2014. Substantial information about the first eight years of the Program (2004–2012) is also provided for context where appropriate.

Information technology can increase energy efficiency by improving the control of energy-using devices and systems. Awareness of this potential is not new—ideas for applications of information technology for energy efficiency have been promoted for more than 20 years. But much of the potential gain from the application of information technology has not yet been realized. Today a combination of new requirements for the operation of the electricity system and the development of new technology has the potential to cause a rapid increase in the pace of adoption of improved controls. In this paper we discuss one promising avenue for technology advancement. First, we review some basic concepts with emphasis on open software-architecture. Then we describe the components of XBOS, a realization of this open software-architecture. XBOS has the ability to monitor and control many different sensors and devices using both wired and wireless communication and a variety of communication protocols. Finally, we illustrate the capabilities of XBOS with examples from an XBOS installation in a small commercial office building in Berkeley California.

This is a case study for the State Partnership for Energy Efficient Demonstrations (originally UC/CSU Energy Efficient Campuses) project (contract number 500-10-049), conducted by the California Institute for Energy and Environment. The information from the SPEED project contributes to the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER)'s Buildings End-Use Efficiency Program.

Benchmark-based, whole building energy performance targets are becoming the best practice method for designing energy efficient and zero net energy buildings. There are several advantages to energy performance targets, including a static baseline (to allow for comparison of buildings over time), the ability to capture energy use and efficiency for all building energy loads (not just the loads regulated by code), and the ability to carry design targets through to operations. UC Merced has been using whole-building energy performance targets since its founding and has had great success in delivering buildings with very energy efficient designs that perform to those design targets in their ongoing operations. In addition, benchmarks available for UC campuses provide targets that address peak demand. For these reasons, the UC campuses are encouraged to adopt whole-building energy performance targets in their building design process, to help maintain UC’s leadership in energy efficiency.

The goal of the 2.5 year Distributed Intelligent Automated Demand Response (DIADR) project was to reduce peak electricity load of Sutardja Dai Hall at UC Berkeley by 30% while maintaining a healthy, comfortable, and productive environment for the occupants. We sought to bring together both central and distributed control to provide “deep” demand response at the appliance level of the building as well as typical lighting and HVAC applications. This project brought together Siemens Corporate Research and Siemens Building Technology (the building has a Siemens Apogee Building Automation System (BAS)), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (leveraging their Open Automated Demand Response (openADR), Auto-­Demand Response, and building modeling expertise), and UC Berkeley (related demand response research including distributed wireless control, and grid-­to-­building gateway development).

This is a case study for the State Partnership for Energy Efficient Demonstrations (originally UC/CSU Energy Efficient Campuses) project (contract number 500-10-049), conducted by the California Institute for Energy and Environment. The information from the SPEED project contributes to the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER)'s Buildings End-Use Efficiency Program.

Measurement of building environmental parameters is often complex, expensive, and not easily proceduralized in a manner that covers all commercial buildings. Evaluating building indoor environmental quality performance is therefore not standard practice. This project developed a prototype toolkit that addressed existing barriers to widespread indoor environmental quality performance evaluation. A toolkit with both hardware and software elements was designed for practitioners around the indoor environmental quality requirements of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers / Chartered Institution of Building Services / United States Green Building Council Performance Measurement Protocols. This unique toolkit was built on a wireless mesh network with a web-based data collection, analysis, and reporting application. The toolkit provided a fast, robust deployment of sensors, real-time data analysis, Performance Measurement Protocol-based analysis methods and a scorecard and report generation tools. A web-enabled Geographic Information System-based metadata collection system also reduced field-study deployment time. The toolkit was evaluated through three case studies, which were discussed in this report.

Information feedback loops for building performance range from the long-term— including university education of building designers and their experiential learning from past work on a time scale of years or decades; to the short term—including building occupants seeking to manage their environment with operable windows and thermostats, to building controls themselves on a time scale of seconds or minutes. In between are owners seeking to make informed renovation and retrofit decisions on a time scale of years, and operators looking for ongoing commissioning opportunities on a time scale of hours to months.

Unfortunately all of these feedback loops are often broken, with meaningful convenient performance information typically unavailable for decision-making. Even automatic building controls often fail to perform as expected because of erroneous or missing data from sensors. We examine the current typical disconnects for each of the feedback loops, their interactions, and potential solutions. 

Both improved technology and organizational change are needed to fully establish all the feedback loops for building performance, achieving the twin goals of building quality (e.g., comfort) and reduced resource use (e.g., energy). Currently research sometimes provides an intervention to temporarily close one or more of the feedback loops. However, closing of information feedback loops is often inhibited by perceptions of professional or business risk. Achieving the vision of ubiquitous deep efficiency for buildings will require research, development and demonstration integrating both technological and sociological issues to durably establish feedback at all time scales in building design and operation.

Proceedings of the 2012 ACEEE Summer Study (Panel 4, Paper 1130). Monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) emphasizes permanent energy performance metering and trending—for diagnosis of energy waste, for savings accounting, and to enable persistence of savings. Emphasis on monitoring represents a paradigm shift for the retro-commissioning (RCx) industry, which has traditionally relied upon test protocols and modeled savings estimates. Since 2004, a major monitoring-based commissioning program at twenty-five California university campuses has evolved to meet the changing needs of university and utility partners. More recently the monitoring-based approach has been adopted by third-party programs in California. We present information on the progression of program design and results for the multiple phases of the original program, along with a look at third-party and other programs adopting similar program features.