Technologies enabling sustainability in the built environment

Energy conservation is among society's greatest challenges, and the built environment has a concentrated impact on our natural environment, economy, and health. Fundamental understandings of how energy is consumed, monitored, and controlled are key prerequisites for an energy conservation process. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of real-time energy monitors (RTM) to influence behavior change in residential consumers. A methodology for remote identification of load types along the electrical circuitry where they (load) are being consumed is also presented. The load type and status (on, off, standby) are determined both remotely and in a non-intrusive manner using Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring Methods. A bottom-up approach to real-time energy monitoring by integrating virtual and physical domains to increase user awareness on where, when, how and why aspect of energy to make inform decisions regarding energy consumption, optimization and conservation is proposed. A virtual 3-D environment is developed to display actual space/zone/building real-time power consumption information and to allow users to easily locate equipment/loads that are in standby/inefficient and causing energy waste in the real/physical environment. The proposed system using wireless ZigBee based monitoring system is demonstrated via a prototype board virtually integrated with a real world test environment. The results establish a promising tool in this filed.