Building Energy Efficiency Improvement via Smart Building Solutions: Introduction to Methodologies

Abstract

Because of the increase of the commercial sector in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission, any successful response to the threats for achieving energy and environmental sustainability must be significantly considered. Specifically, air-conditioning systems presently consume around 60 percentages of total energy consumption for providing space cooling and heating in commercial buildings. To improve these significant issues, building automation system (BAS) has been gradually increased in energy efficiency objectives, especially in large-scaled commercial buildings. Although a lot of published documents significantly demonstrate potential energy saving via BAS solution, there are considerable barriers to effective market penetration in terms of cost-prohibitive, non-scalable, non-flexible, inefficient energy management and preventive maintenance issues. To solve these issues, smart building solutions have been introduced and continuously developed over 10 years in developed counties. The concepts of the solutions are: 1) low capital and installation costs with returning on investment (ROI) being less than one year; 2) a non - invasive technique that does not interrupt normal operations and 3) plug-n-play (PnP) for self-configurable and self-scalable implementations. These approaches can enhance efficient energy management, productivity of occupant comfort and better decisions. The current article introducesthe aforementioned methodologies for enabling in commercial buildings consisting of: plug-n-play data exchange carrier, automated calibration, virtual sensing and modelling technology, automated diagnostics, decision-making and soft-repair technologies.