Contribution of New Digital Technologies to the Digital Building Logbook

According to the European Commission, the Digital Building Logbook (DBL) is a repository of all of the relevant data of a building. It was first introduced at the European scale in the Renovation Wave strategy and was first defined in the proposal for the recast of the energy performance of buildings Directive in December 2021. The European DBL has not been implemented yet, since a common model does not yet exist. Even though great efforts are being made to establish it, some relevant issues need to be addressed first. One of them is the identification of data sources that will feed the DBL. Existing digital data sources have already been explored in some countries and they have been found to be insufficient. In this paper, new digital data sources suitable for the logbook are identified, and their contribution in terms of indicators and interoperability is analysed. The analysis shows that these sources have great potential to contribute to the DBL, because they bring the possibility to collect a great amount of real data on buildings. However, the main barrier for these tools to be incorporated into the DBL is that their linkage still requires further research

An Automatic Aggregator of Power Flexibility in Smart Buildings Using Software Based Orchestration

This paper presents a software-based modular and hierarchical building energy management system (BEMS) to control the power consumption in sensor-equipped buildings. In addition, the need of this type of solution is also highlighted by presenting the worldwide trends of thermal energy end use in buildings and peak power problems. Buildings are critical component of smart grid environments and bottom-up BEMS solutions are need of the hour to optimize the consumption and to provide consumption side flexibility. This system is able to aggregate the controls of the all-controllable resources in building to realize its flexible power capacity. This system provides a solution for consumer to aggregate the controls of ‘behind-the-meter’ small loads in short response and provide ‘deep’ demand-side flexibility. This system is capable of discovery, status check, control and management of networked loads. The main novelty of this solution is that it can handle the heterogeneity of the installed hardware system along with time bound changes in the load device network and its scalability; resulting in low maintenance requirements after deployment. The control execution latency (including data logging) of this BEMS system for an external control signal is less than one second per connected load. In addition, the system is capable of overriding the external control signal in order to maintain consumer coziness within the comfort temperature thresholds. This system provides a way forward in future for the estimation of the energy stored in the buildings in the form of heat/temperature and use buildings as temporary batteries when electricity supply is constrained or abundant