Nine lessons learned from a green building testbed: A networking and energy efficiency perspective

Buildings are significant contributors to global energy consumption and their energy efficiency is an important issue for future world sustainability. In our project, we built an energy efficiency research testbed in a USGBC (United States Green Building Council) LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) “gold” certificated green building. We monitored the energy consumption and studied the recorded consumption data. In this paper, from a combined networking and energy efficiency perspective, we summarize the major 9 lessons we learned from the testbed and discuss what they mean for the future intelligent building designs and operation. We further broaden the scope to a series of locally inter-connected intelligent buildings with both energy consumption and renewable energy generating capability and study the issues in a microgrid scale.