Toward Sustainable Energy-Independent Buildings Using Internet of Things

Buildings are one of the primary consumers of energy. In addition to the electricity grids, renewable energies can be used to supply the energy demand of buildings. Intelligent systems such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor technologies can also be applied to manage the energy consumption in buildings. Fortunately, integrating renewable energies with these intelligent systems enables creating nearly zero-energy buildings. In this paper, we present the results of our experimentation to demonstrate forming such a building and showing the benefits for building users and the society. We create a system by integrating photovoltaic (PV) technology with an IoT-based control mechanism to supply and consume energy. We further illustrate “how the integration of IoT and PV technology can bring added value to the users?”. To this end, we evaluate the performance of our system against conventional ways of energy supply and consumption for a lighting use case in a dairy store. We also investigate the environmental and economic impacts of our system. In our implementation, for the IoT-based control system, we have used a set of sensors, a server, and a wireless network to control the energy consumption. We developed a web application for user interaction and software-based settings. To control the lighting system, we developed an algorithm that utilizes the ambient light, users’ movements inside the store and a historical dataset. The historical dataset was collected from the users’ behaviour as a training set for the algorithm for turning on and off the lights. We also designed an electricity management system that computes the energy generation by the PV panels, controls the energy supply, and imports and exports electricity to the grid. The results show that our system is an efficient approach for creating energy-independent buildings by integrating renewable energies with IoT-based control systems. The results also show that our system not only responds to the internal demand by using domestic supply, but it also (i) offers economic benefit by exporting extra renewable electricity to the grid, and (ii) prevents producing huge amounts of CO2. Our system is one of the first works to achieve a nearly zero-energy building in the developing countries with low electricity accessibility

Analysis of building energy upgrade technologies for implementing the dual energy efficiency and demand response scheme for non-residential buildings

The continuous growth of renewable energy and the transition to a more de-centralised electricity generation adds significant complexity to balance power supply and demand in the grid. These imbalances are partially compensated by demand response programs, which represent a new business opportunity in the building sector, especially for ESCOs. Including demand response to their traditional energy efficiency-based business model adds an additional revenue stream that could potentially shorten payback periods of energy renovation projects. This paper introduces this new dual-services business model, and evaluates the potential suitability of HVAC, generation and storage technologies to ensure proposed energy efficiency and flexibility goals.This paper is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 745594. This paper reflects only the author´s views and neither the Agency nor the Commission are responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therei

Intelligent Energy Optimization for User Intelligible Goals in Smart Home Environments

Intelligent management of energy consumption is one of the key issues for future energy distribution systems, smart buildings, and consumer appliances. The problem can be tackled both from the point of view of the utility provider, with the intelligence embedded in the smart grid, or from the point of view of the consumer, thanks to suitable local energy management systems (EMS). Conserving energy, however, should respect the user requirements regarding the desired state of the environment, therefore an EMS should constantly and intelligently find the balance between user requirements and energy saving. The paper proposes a solution to this problem, based on explicit high-level modeling of user intentions and automatic control of device states through the solution and optimization of a constrained Boolean satisfiability problem. The proposed approach has been integrated into a smart environment framework, and promising preliminary results are reporte